ANADARKO, Okla. – With diabetes being one of the deadliest diseases among American Indians, there has been a push in recent years to find not only a cure for the disease but also ways to prevent it.
One of the leaders in this research is the Harold Hamm Oklahoma Diabetes Center, which is part of the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center. Recently, the HHODC was awarded two grants in order to continue their studies of diabetes and identify the genetic and lifestyle issues that contribute to diabetes.
The first grant, awarded by the National Institute of Health’s National Council of Research Resources, distributes $11 million over a five-year period in order to train ”junior” diabetes researchers. The current recipients of these grants wrote their own proposals and will be studying in the fields of adult endocrinology, juvenile diabetes research, cell biology and cultural anthropology.
”The idea is we would hope each of them will get their own federal grant funding within two-to-three years, and that each one moves off the support of this grant that we’ve got, and we could bring another person on,” HHODC Director Dr. Timothy Lyons said about the program. ”Another thing we have to show in order to get the grant is we have a pool of people as backup who would be ready to take over as each one graduates from the program. We would be able to bring on a new person.”
The second grant the HHODC received is $6.6 million from National Center for Healthcare Disparities to look at health care disparities in American Indians and diabetes over a five-year period. The grant will be a joint project with the HHODC, OU Health Science Center College of Public Health, the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation. The primary focus of this grant is to address risk factors in pregnant women who have diabetes, reduce pre-eclempsia and study cultural attitudes toward diabetes.
With Oklahoma having a large Native population, there is a need to center diabetes research within the state. Lyons estimated that diabetes cases within the state of Oklahoma alone are as high as 400,000 with an equal number having ”pre-diabetes,” which Lyons said is equally as dangerous and also has the risks of heart disease, stroke and amputation. HHDOC estimates that 40 percent of Oklahoma’s American Indian population has diabetes.
Lyons said that, worldwide, diabetes has increased dramatically in non-white populations, including Pacific Islanders, Africans, Asian Indians, Chinese and African-Americans, in addition to American Indians. One of the theories as to why diabetes – especially Type II diabetes – is higher among non-white populations is what Lyons referred to as the ”Thrifty Gene” theory.
”The thrifty gene says communities were adapted to surviving under certain conditions,” Lyons said. ”If you take American Indians as an example, if you lived in an agrarian society in the southwestern United States, you would go through a number of periods when there was good food supply and periods when there was bad food supply. People who were able to survive were the people who were able to get through the difficult times – the times of famine. Those people were efficient storers of food. When they ate, they tended to store the food efficiently. They put on body weight, they stored up fat, and they could survive a period of inadequate food supply.
”If you have a community which is selected to have people who are efficient in doing that and then you suddenly take away their lifestyle, and you give them a contemporary fast food diet, and they adopt a much more sedentary lifestyle, they continue to store food. They become obese.”
Lyons said that within the past ten years, research has discovered that hormones made within fat tissue can affect how the body regulates insulin. With Type I diabetes, ”the cells that make insulin are completely destroyed,” Lyons said.
Lyons stressed the importance of lifestyle change in order to prevent Type II diabetes, which Lyons said could be reduced by two-thirds, as well as improving the screening process to find diabetes, beginning with blood sugar, cholesterol and high blood pressure checks beginning at age 30.
”I think we have a terrible crisis on our hands,” Lyons said. ”[Oklahoma] is now experiencing – I don’t want to equate people’s illness and suffering to financial measures – but it’s a useful measure of the size of the problem. It’s estimated that diabetes is costing the state of Oklahoma in health care costs and lost income upwards of $2 billion a year. That falls disproportionately on minority communities. It falls disproportionately on the underinsured and the uninsured. It’s unfortunately falling heavily on our children, because obesity in children and poor eating habits in children mean that today right across the United States – like one child in three – is estimated is going to become diabetic in its lifetime.”
