Possible: Diabetes Skin Test

Filed in archive Developments , Research on May 30, 2007

Since type 2 diabetes is characterized by being insensitive to insulin leading to high sugar levels, leading a team of researchers from Ohio University, Athens (led by John Kopchick) to believe that the condition can alter the abundance of various skin proteins - thereby making the skin a possible alternative in diagnosing type 2 diabetes.

Kopchick and his colleagues decided to see whether they could detect protein changes in the skin of mice specially bred to gain weight and develop diabetes when fed fatty food.

So after feeding these mice on a high-fat diet for 16 weeks, Kopchick and his colleagues killed them and removed a piece of their skin, which they liquefied and then analysed with two-dimensional gel electrophoresis.

They did the same with normal mice fed a standard diet and then used a computer program to compare the patterns of protein spots on the resultant gels.

The results, although may potentially diagnose diabetes through the skin, are still being studied further whether the changes in skin protein biomarkers are due to diabetes alone and not obesity - since obesity is usually a precursor of type 2 diabetes.

However, if the study proved to be successful in human, we are looking at a future of a dermal diagnostic tool that will detect type 2 diabetes even before the symptoms appear.

Also, the method can also have possible applications in other serious diseases.

Read the full report.