BCG stand for the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, which was developed by two French scientists called Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin. After much development it was introduced in 1921 and has been used extensively as a vaccine against tuberculosis.

It seems to have a number of interesting effects on the immune system which mark it out as rather different from other vaccines. It has been used to prevent a number of other diseases, and can be of value in bladder cancer. There is now evidence that it may have a place in the treatment of some people with Type 1 diabetes.

Trials have used BCG to kill the immune cells that are responsible for destroying the insulin producing cells in the pancreas, which leads to Type 1 diabetes. Studies using mice have shown that a similar treatment results in a permanent cure for about a third animals treated in this way.

This is still a long way away from this to direct application to humans and this approach will probably be successful in only a minority of cases, but it does represent another interesting development.

Read more at www.diabetescurereview.com/BCG-vaccine.html

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I just came across a very interesting report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) from January this year. This was a controlled trial of surgery (gastric banding) comared with conventional weight loss treatments in obese people with Type 2 diabetes.

The conventionally treated group lost less than 2% of their weight on average, although there was some improvement in their diabetes in those who lost more than 10%. The surgical group lost an average of more than 20% of their weight over the 2 year study period, and a stunning 73% of them had complete remission of their diabetes, with no serious complications of the surgery.

Strong evidence indeed that weight loss is the key to improving control in Type 2 diabetes, although it is disappointing that the results in the diet alone group were so poor and that they lost so little weight. The diet, however, was the usual “balanced” diet still usually recommended by dieticians for wieght loss, and I wonder what would have happenned if a low carbohydrate approach had been used. We can’t use gastric banding on everybody!

The reference is Dixon et al. JAMA Jan 23, 2008. Vol 299 No3. 316-323.