Teflon – in your kitchen and in your diabetes treatment?

Teflon may hold the key to successfully allowing medical professionals to implant insulin-producing cells into people with diabetes.  And that could be good news for those who are dependent on as many as four daily insulin injections to treat their diabetes.

Yes, the same Teflon that was used to coat non-stick pans has been used by scientists at the University of California San Diego and the Burnham Institute for Medical Research to cover a tiny implant of insulin-producing cells.  What they’ve found is that the Teflon coating seems to stop immune system cells from attacking and destroying what it would otherwise see as foreign tissue. 

That could be great news for people who have diabetes as efforts to transplant a whole pancreas has proven to be very difficult – and donated organs are hard to come by.  Instead some researchers began looking at harvesting insulin-producing cells (islet cells) from donors and injecting them into a patient’s liver.

This hasn’t been an easy process either  – each patient receiving a transplant needed about 300,000 islet cells and that required up to four matching donors for each transplant plus a lifetime of immune suppressant drugs to avoid rejection.  Other researchers have looked to pigs as insulin-producing cell donors.  While the cells from pigs are a close match for human cells, they are still seen by the body’s immune system as a foreign invader.

That’s what led the California scientists to look for a way to get around the problem of donor cells being rejected by the body’s defense mechanisms.

Medical uses are not new for Teflon, even though most of us think of it mainly in association with cooking utensils.  Teflon is a lubricant and it’s compatible with human tissue.  It doesn’t cause the immune system to automatically attack when introduced into the body.  That’s led to its use in surgical implants like coronary stents.

When the California researchers put islet cells in a Teflon pouch and injected it into laboratory mice, they found the cells survived and were able to produce insulin daily.  While these are early experiments, and making this available for humans may take a long time, it’s exciting research that could help lead us to new and better diabetes treatments.

While research results like this hold great promise, it’s important to continue focusing on what works for your diabetes today.  If you haven’t been tested for diabetes or prediabetes, there’s no better time to do so.  And there’s no better time to start eating a healthy diet rich in fruits and vegetables, getting some more exercise and making sure you make regular trips to your dentist’s office for checkups.  Why your dentist’s office?  Because what the dentist sees in your mouth – especially if you have gum disease – can also be an early indicator that you have prediabetes or diabetes or if you already have it that it’s getting out of control.

Not all dentists are alike when it comes to understanding the links between dental health and high blood sugar levels or other systemic health problems.  Every Dentistry For Diabetics^SM dentist, on the other hand, is thoroughly trained in the connections between gum disease and high blood sugar readings.  They also know how to lower blood sugar using specific types of dental therapy, so follow this link to find a Dentistry For Diabetics^SM dentist near you.