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By Nancy Lapid, Health Science Editor

Welcome, Health Rounds readers!  Today we feature another two studies from this week’s big diabetes meeting in Hamburg. One of the studies suggests it may be possible to grow healthy pancreas cells in test tubes to treat type 1 diabetes; the other helps identify which smokers are at particularly high risk for developing diabetes. We also highlight a study published today that suggests exposure to “pink noise” during deep sleep may contribute to a stronger heart.

In breaking news, see these stories from our Reuters journalists: 

New weight loss drugs have higher rates of serious GI side effects; Kaiser Permanente and striking health workers hit bargaining snag; About 4 million Americans got updated COVID vaccines in September; ‘Haze cannot be the norm’: Malaysia urges Indonesia to take action; EU strikes deal to reduce super-potent greenhouse gases; Britain proposes banning cigarettes for younger generations; and UK police open investigation into killer nurse’s hospital.

A pattern of metabolic changes that occurs in response to smoking causes can help predict which smokers are likely to develop diabetes, researchers say.  REUTERS/Maja Smiejkowska

A type of insulin-producing pancreas cell grown from stem cells in the laboratory showed great promise in a small, early-stage trial of patients with type 1 diabetes (T1D).

Researchers hope the approach developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals may one day lead to a better treatment or even a cure for insulin-dependant patients.

Data on the first six adults to receive the stem cell-derived islet cells, half of whom no longer require insulin, was presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual meeting in Hamburg on Tuesday.

“These results are truly remarkable and offer hope of a life-changing therapy for people who suffer from the relentless life-long burden of type 1 diabetes,” said study leader Dr. Trevor Reichman of the University of Toronto.

People with T1D do not have functional cells in the pancreas to produce the body’s own insulin and require daily insulin injections or pumps to survive.

Everyone in the study had been taking high doses of insulin for many years and had been having trouble regulating their disease, frequently experiencing life-threatening low blood sugar episodes.

All six of the early participants had markedly improved blood sugar control after infusions of the cells, researchers reported.

One of the three who achieved insulin independence has gone 24 months without it. The other two have not needed insulin for 12 months and 6 months, respectively.

A fourth patient stopped taking insulin but resumed the injections 15 months after the treatment.

The treatment, known as VX-880, is being tested in a further 10 patients before proceeding to larger trials.

It has been granted PRIME designation by the European Medicines Agency and Fast Track Designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a sign that regulators believe it has the potential to be an important advance.

Stimulating the brain with gentle sounds during deep sleep may benefit the heart, researchers say.

The discovery could have implications not only for cardiovascular diseases but also for competitive sports, according to a report published on Thursday in the European Heart Journal.

The study involved 18 healthy middle-aged men who each spent three non-consecutive nights in a sleep laboratory.

On one night, participants slept normally. During the other two, when monitoring tools indicated the volunteer had fallen into deep sleep, a computer played 10 seconds of very brief tones at certain frequencies, known as pink noise, which sound like static, and 10 seconds of silence, over and over.

During the alternating periods of noise and silence, the researchers saw an increase in slow brain waves, indicating deeper sleep, and an increased heart rate, according to the report.

The mornings after the pink noise stimulation, ultrasound examinations showed that participants’ hearts were expanding and contracting more vigorously than when they had initially signed up for the study.

The increased blood flow as a result has a positive effect on the cardiovascular system, the researchers said.

“Despite the relatively small group of subjects, the results are significant,” study leader Caroline Lustenberger of ETH Zurich said in a statement. “We were also able to reproduce the results on two separate nights, which in statistical terms makes them very strong.”

This kind of deep sleep stimulation system might also enable improved cardiac function and faster and better recovery after intense exercise, her team said.

More research is needed to make sure that long-term use of the treatment would not have adverse side effects, they added.

Smoking causes changes in chemicals produced by the body’s metabolism, and the pattern of those changes can help predict which smokers are likely to develop diabetes, researchers reported on Wednesday at the European diabetes meeting in Hamburg.

The researchers analyzed hundreds of metabolites in blood samples from 93,722 never, former, and current smokers without diabetes in the UK. During an average follow-up of 13 years, 1,869 developed diabetes.

Smoking was associated with changes in 131 metabolites, with increases in some and decreases in others. Collectively, the pattern of affected metabolites indicated whether an individual was likely to develop type 2 diabetes, the researchers found.

A high amount of metabolite changes was associated with a 61% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to a low level, they reported.

The influence of the metabolic changes on diabetes risk was strongest in people with genetic susceptibility to type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance, the researchers said.

“Our findings suggest that it is even more important for people with high genetic susceptibility to avoid smoking than the general population,” study leader Yuxia Wei from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden said in a statement.

Her team also tested the metabolic signature in blood samples from 3,626 volunteers in Sweden and found its ability to determine type 2 diabetes risk was similar despite the fact that individuals living in the UK and Sweden have different dietary habits, lifestyles, and environmental exposures.

Most of the smoking-related metabolic changes are reversible after patients quit smoking, the researchers noted.

“Our metabolism is constantly changing depending on what we ingest or are exposed to,” Wei noted.

This newsletter was edited by Bill Berkrot.

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