Have you ever wondered why diabetics need limb amputations more than the average person?
Have you ever wondered why blindness, heart attacks and strokes are more prevalent in diabetics?
In short, diabetes damages blood vessels, and the abovementioned problems occur when the blood circulation to your limbs, retina, heart, and brain is cut off.
Endothelial cells line your blood vessel walls. They are supposed to keep your blood vessel walls strong.
When these cells are damaged, the walls of your blood vessels start to disintegrate, which leads to a condition medical scientists call vascular leakiness.
…which often leads to blindness.
And when the body tries to replace these leaky blood vessels, they do not create normal ones, they create leakier ones.
Therefore, once a diabetic gets damaged blood vessels, the body just continues replacing them with even more damaged ones.
This is the process that leads to diabetic retinopathy, otherwise known as blindness, in diabetics.
Up to now, researchers have believed that the culprit behind this vascular leakiness was a molecule called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF).
Unfortunately, drugs designed to stop VEGF only work for about one third of patients.
However, there is some hope. Scientists at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine have discovered a protein called secretogranin III that acts like another culprit in the degeneration of blood vessel walls.
So far, the scientists have been able to block the protein in mice, but it’s a long way off human trials.