Diabetes And Tuberculosis: A Wake Up Call From A 2000 Year Scientific Slumber by Lawrence Broxmeyer

Online, November 25, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Although diabetes is felt to be an "autoimmune" disorder for which trials are now underway at Massachusetts General for an attempted cure using a TB vaccine, Elias and Markovits had long ago pointed the way. Not only did Elias show that tubercular elements could cause Type 1 diabetes, but that they could also act as a vaccine to stop it in its track. So, even without an 'immunological' explanation, it came as no surprise to Dr. Lawrence Broxmeyer that dilute bovine tuberculosis, almost identical to human tuberculosis, could be used as a possible cure for Type 1. Especially if such diabetes was caused by tuberculosis in the first place. It is a phenomena seen frequently in nature whereby one bacteria or mycobacteria destroys another through its viral "phage" weaponry. Broxmeyer knew whereof he spoke, having designed a study to use one strain of tuberculosis to kill two others, pathogenic to man, through their viral "phages" (mycobacteriophages), a study which landed up in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The peculiar relationship and frequent association of diabetes mellitus and tuberculosis has been observed for more than 2000 years, yet the reason for this correlation is, to this day, not known. "Before the discovery of insulin, a diagnosis of diabetes was a death sentence within 5 years," said Dr. Broxmeyer, "and the usual cause of that death was tuberculosis. Despite this, in the 5th century, tuberculosis was already incredibly being portrayed as a 'complication' of diabetes, a view little changed to this day, parroting Root's original 1934 'one-sided relationship': tuberculosis seen only as a common complication of diabetes. But in France, Chalier suggested TB as not only a complication of diabetes but its cause. To Nichol's, tuberculosis as a complication of diabetes was 'not logically tenable' and in his study of 178 otherwise healthy, non-diabetic military men with tuberculosis at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital, one-third had abnormal glucose screening tests. Like Smith before him Nichol therefore saw TB as causative of diabetes. But despite His and Smith's findings, as well as those of Reaud in New York, this was not being recognized elsewhere, and Nichols wanted to know why."

"Nichols concluded that the incidence of diabetes among tuberculosis victims was being considerably underestimated, and that diabetes developed quite commonly in tuberculosis patients. Diabetes, he reasoned, was easy to detect. Tuberculosis was not."

"The evidence for a mycobacterial cause of diabetes is mounting rapidly," said Broxmeyer. "Schwartz and Haas both linked Type-2 diabetes to forms of tuberculosis. And the pancreatic islet amyloid deposits that they found as a by-product of systemic tubercular infection have recently been dissolved by rifampicin, a first line drug against tuberculosis. Engelbach spoke of 'transitory' diabetes in TB and Karachunskii noted changes in carbohydrate metabolism in patients with tuberculosis which commonly led to insulin deficiency with persistently elevated blood sugar, even without 'diabetes'."

"More importantly," Dr. Broxmeyer continued, "mycobacterial elements have been shown not only to cause 'autoimmune' Type-1 diabetes in mice, but act as a vaccine to stop the inevitable diabetes that would otherwise materialize. The documentation of where TB has preceded and come before the development of diabetes is extensive yet underplayed. Tuberculosis of the pancreas, were diabetes arises, said Kudrewetzky, opposing modern consensus, is a frequent disease, yet he acknowledged it was seldom mentioned in autopsy reports. And contrary to his own expectations, Joslin's records showed that tuberculosis frequently occurred before diabetes."

"By 1991," Lawrence Broxmeyer continued, "two years before The World Health Organization (WHO) belatedly issued its first ever global emergency regarding tuberculosis, a disease estimated to kill one human every 10 seconds, a WHO ad hoc committee announced that an apparent worldwide epidemic of diabetes had occurred as well. Yet CDC maps for US Diabetes and TB both showed the same predominantly southern US distribution for either disease, with major inroads along much of the eastern seaboard."

"Coincidentally", reminded Lawrence Broxmeyer MD, "the American Indians have some of the highest diabetes rates in the country, nearly four times greater than other Americans. But it is within this subgroup, that the highest levels of diabetes in the world are found, in the Pima Indians of Arizona."

"Diabetes, however," said Broxmeyer , "was and is not the only problem facing the American Indians and the Pimas. For if Indian diabetes soared, their rate of TB was more than five times greater than that for other Americans."

"Diabetes has been around since the first century AD," Broxmeyer concluded, "in a perpetual state of coping and managing. It is time, it is long past time, to cure diabetes and current attempts are welcome. But at the same time existing models and explanations as to diabetes's true cause aren't adequate and need to be expanded."

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