Over 40 million Americans have diabetes and roughly 98 million Americans are prediabetic, according to the American Diabetes Association.
In the medical community, there are advancements in finding prediabetic markers and advancements in CRISPR to provide a new method of insulin production, creating effective accessibility to insulin.
Though as recent as this advancement is this information is being broadcasted, there is a new method of lowering diabetes rates through the research done by the scientists at Gladstone Institutes.
These scientists researched how people living at higher altitudes have a lower risk of diabetes. This is due to hypoxic, which occurs when there is low oxygen in a high-altitude environment. This allows an increase in the amount of glucose that red blood cells intake.
This intake allows adaptability to a lowered insulin-sensitivity, enabling a better retention of insulin and allowing the body to manage insulin consumption.
This in turn prevents the body from overworking metabolic reactions, a leading factor of the lack of insulin production in diabetes patients.
The role that RBCs play in this phenomenon of metabolic reactions allows for an analogy that the scientists at Gladstone coined as sugar sponges.
This allows for up to a 50% insulin reduction, compared to low altitudes having a higher dependency on insulin in regards to metabolic reactions.
This allows for the aforementioned burnout to happen, which is what allows for the pharmacological industry profiting off insulin, due to the demand in lower altitude areas.
As CRISPR allowed another means to produce insulin, the scientists at Gladstone are considering a new drug to treat diabetes known as HypoxyStat.
What differs HypoxyStat from the other diabetes treatments that get proposed or used, is that it could be a means to reverse high blood sugar in humans, which would make the human body less dependent on insulin.
Currently, tests done on mice with diabetes that have impressed the Gladstone scientists with their better-than-expected results.
The drug itself causes RBCs to grab a tighter hold of oxygen, similar to how RBCs act in high altitude locations.
This gives low altitude pedestrians access to benefits that the high-altitude pedestrians get, by being less dependent on insulin.
This advancement gives the medical community an alternative way to treat diabetes, allowing for a better lifestyle.
