flushing away high blood sugars

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Every time the heart beats, about 20 percent of the blood it pumps out goes

to the kidneys to be cleaned.

Flushing Away High Blood Sugar

von Wartburg

Jan 17, 2011

Most type 2 <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/community/type-2-issues/>

meds work by increasing insulin

<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/medications/insulin/> production in

one way or another. The extra insulin lowers blood sugar

<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/monitoring/blood-sugar/> by ushering

it out of your bloodstream and into your cells, where it may, unfortunately,

make you fat. Wouldn't it be nice if instead, you could lower your high

blood sugar by just flushing it right down the toilet?

A couple of pharma companies are working on a therapy that may do just that.

Their treatment, called an SGLT2 inhibitor, causes your extra blood sugar to

flow harmlessly away in your urine. To understand how an SGLT2 (sodium

glucose transporter 2) inhibitor works, you have to know a little about what

the kidneys do.

Every time the heart beats, about 20 percent of the blood it pumps out goes

to the kidneys to be cleaned. The blood ends up in a tuft of tiny blood

vessels, called a glomerulus, which is surrounded by a cup-like sac, called

a Bowman's capsule. Each kidney has a million or so of these little

arrangements.

High blood pressure in the glomerulus forces all the small molecules in the

blood right through the blood vessel walls and into the Bowman's capsule,

where they begin their journey down a little tubule toward the bladder. This

liquid filtrate contains not only waste products, which the body wants to

get rid of, but also a lot of useful molecules, which the body doesn't want

to lose. One of those useful molecules is glucose.

The body has to have a way to re-absorb that glucose back into the blood,

and that's where SGLT2 comes into play. As the filtrate moves down the

tubule, SGLT2 grabs almost all of the glucose going by and pulls it back

into the walls of the tubule, from whence it can be moved back into the

blood and used by the body.

An SGLT2 inhibitor prevents SGLT2 from doing its job. If SGLT2 can't grab

the glucose, that glucose is on its way to the sewage treatment plant. It's

a novel way to lower blood sugar in people with diabetes

<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/> , and it might work well for obesity too.

Studies have shown that such inhibitors may cause the excretion of up to 90

grams of glucose per day, and each gram is worth four calories.

There is no SGLT2 inhibitor on the market yet, but a company called Sirona

Biochem announced recently that in a preclinical trial, its SGLT2 inhibitor

reduced blood glucose levels in a dose-dependent manner by as much as 50

percent compared to untreated groups. Another SGLT2 inhibitor, called

dapagliflozin, is being studied in clinical trials by Bristol-Myers Squibb

and AstraZeneca as a treatment for diabetes.

***

Sources:

Sirona Biochem

<http://www.sironabiochem.com/index.php?option=com_content & view=article & id=6

2:sirona-biochem-announces-positive-preclinical-results-for-diabetes-drug-ca

ndidate & catid=10:press-releases>