If you have Type 1 diabetes or have a family member with this autoimmune disorder, you know firsthand the daily rigors of managing this disease. There is the daily monitoring of the blood glucose level, the careful storage of vials of insulin, purchasing the injection supplies, and then rotating the location for the injection.

Will it ever be possible to avoid, or at least reduce, this daily regiment for diabetics? There was encouraging news recently that may offer a glimmer of hope. It involves stem cell research. Stem cell research has been controversial when it has been in the news media.

What are stem cells anyway? Basically, nearly all multi-celled organisms have stem cells. Stem cells are different than other cells in that they possess the ability to transform themselves into a diverse array of other cell types, making them very important. There are two main categories of stem cells. They are embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells.

Most of the controversy surrounding stem cell research comes from harvesting embryonic stem cells. To put your mind at rest, the recent research about stem cells and diabetes have focused on adult stem cells that already exist in the body. These adult stem cells can act as a type of repair system for the body. Do you see where this leading now?

Researchers from the U.S. and Brazil recently announced that they were successful in transplanting a patient’s own blood stem cells back into the patient intravenously. These patients, and there were 23 who had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes within six weeks, received this treatment. What were the results?

The initial results were very encouraging. After receiving this stem cell transplant treatment, it was amazing that 20 out of the 23 patients were able to be free of requiring repeated insulin injections for periods of time that ranged from a few months to even years. Of the 20 patients, 12 were able to be insulin-free for an average of 31 months. The other eight patients experienced a range of benefit from six to 47 months.

There was even one patient that had this therapy that required no insulin injections for more than four years! These reports were in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Is this therapy for everyone? No. There are inherent risks in this therapy. After a blood sample from the patient is received, and the stem cells harvested from the blood, a regimen of chemotherapy is administered to suppress the patient’s immune system. Risk of infection can be high during this period.

The stem cells that were harvested are reintroduced into the patient with the effect that the immune system of the patient can then “reboot” as it were. (This is why chemotherapy is needed to suppress the immune system.) This process of “rebooting” the immune system is what may allow the pancreas and its insulin-producing cells (called beta cells) to either regenerate or make repairs to the existing cells.

So if you have Type 1 diabetes symptoms, or someone you love does, pay attention to further developments in this area of stem cell research. This has been the most promising research to date on reversing the effects of Type 1 diabetes.