Still waiting on a cure for diabetes

Hope for diabetes cure — Hope for the prevention and eventual cure of diabetes was given at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., where specialists met to discuss techniques that should be used in population studies of the disease. An estimated 26 million people throughout the world have diabetes…. Insulin, discovered more than 40 years ago, still remains the best treatment, Dr. Howard F. Root, president of the Diabetes Foundation, Boston, said in an interview. “No pills by mouth are as effective as insulin,” he added. — Science News Letter, October 17, 1964

UPDATE

In 2012, 29.1 million people in the United States alone had diabetes, and the number of cases worldwide was 371 million. Insulin remains the standard of care for those with type 1 diabetes, but researchers are examining other possibilities, from reprogrammed stem cells to a bionic pancreas. For type 2 diabetes, along with diet and lifestyle changes, pills such as metformin have been the treatments of choice since the 1970s, when they replaced drugs with similar mechanisms.