Common blood pressure drug verapamil effectively reversed diabetes on animal subjects. Researchers plan to start the human trials in early 2015.
Diabetes remains to be the seventh leading cause of death in the United States since 2010. In 2012, 29.1 million or 9.3 percent of the American population had diabetes. Diabetes can also lead to other complications such as hypoglycaemia, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, eye problems, kidney disease and amputations.
Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham studied the specialized cells in the pancreas which produce the insulin that the body needs to regulate blood sugar. An early study showed that high blood sugar causes the body to produce high levels of TXNIP, a protein linked to the development of diabetes. But the researchers discovered that a common blood pressure drug called verapamil can be used to slow down the production of these proteins and eventually reverse diabetes.
"We have previously shown that verapamil can prevent diabetes and even reverse the disease in mouse models and reduce TXNIP in human islet beta cells, suggesting that it may have beneficial effects in humans as well," said Dr. Anath Shalev, director of UAB's Comprehensive Diabetes Center and principal investigator of the verapamil clinical trial, in the release.
The study is the first to use the blood pressure drug to treat diabetes.
By early next year, the researchers will recruit 52 people between ages 19 and 45 who were diagnosed with diabetes within three months. The participants will be divided into a verapamil group and a placebo group. The study will run for a year, and all participants will continue their insulin pump therapy. Their blood sugar will also be regularly monitored through a glucose monitoring system.
"If verapamil works in humans, it would be a truly revolutionary development in a disease affecting more people each year to the tune of billions of dollars annually," Dr. Fernando Ovalle, director of UAB's Comprehensive Diabetes Clinic and co-principal investigator of the study, said in the release.
