Question: How close are you to understanding the cause of diabetes?

Melissa Brereton answered on 17 Mar 2013:

I work on a type of diabetes called “Neonatal diabetes” which occurs in babies when they are less than 6 months old. These babies are born with a mutation (a part of their DNA is altered) that causes their blood sugar to go too high. So the work that I have been doing is to show that if we give a tablet that corrects this mutation, their diabetes is cured! This is pretty cool huh?

But for the most common form of diabetes (type 2 diabetes) this is usually caused by obesity and a lack of exercise. Although eating less and exercising more can help improve the diabetes, usually the body has already become too damaged at the point the doctor diagnoses the disease. A lot of other research is aimed at trying to find ways to grow new cells in the pancreas (the organ that is damaged in diabetes) so that it can be given to these patients to help cure them