Study suggests diabetes patients should be on medicines to prevent heart attacks
The fight or flight hormone is also a life and death hormone, it seems.
Stress hormones can save lives, or take them, especially in diabetics. Released during an emergency or in pressure situations, stress hormones can gang up with white blood cells to fight infections or lead to heart attacks.
New research shows that white blood vessels can become overactive and cause inflammation in plaques in blood vessels. This makes them vulnerable to rupture and hemorrhage in people with diabetes. These cells normally play a role in healing infections and injuries. The findings are from a team from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine published in the journal Immunity.
The major cause of death in people with diabetes is heart attack. India has a population of approximately 70 million diabetics.
“If the rupture occurs in the coronary artery, the person has a heart attack. If the rupture occurs in the carotid artery, it causes a stroke,” said Partha Dutta, D.V.M., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at Pitt’s School of Medicine.
The major cause of death in people with diabetes is heart attack. India has a population of approximately 70 million diabetics.
Studying patients and mice with diabetes, Dutta and his team found that when the fight-or-flight response is triggered, it also triggers the over-production of fighting white blood cells, or leukocytes.
They also showed for the first time that stress hormones, called catecholamines, are produced in the spleen by a sub-group of white blood cells.
“The findings suggest that diabetic patients could be treated with beta 2 blockers to reduce the number of inflammatory myeloid cells that cause plaque to rupture,” said Dutta, the senior author of the study. “If patients are on beta 2 blockers, the spleen will still be making the myeloid cells necessary to fight infection, but in smaller amounts.”
