Now scientists are making a tantalizing question: What if the disease could be prevented with pills containing the same drug that patients inject daily?
Hayden Murphy, 13, of Plainfield, Illinois, helps determine whether the strategy works for Type 1 diabetes, the kind that is usually diagnosed in childhood. If it works, you can avoid the complicated life that his brother Weston faces 5 years. This includes countless picket fingers and checks glucose levels and avoid playing too much or eating too little, since both can cause fluctuations of glucose.
Hayden Murphy is among the more than 400 children and adults participating in international research funded by the US government to see if the capsules of experimental insulin can prevent or at least delay diabetes Type 1 Hospitals in the United States and eight other countries are involved, and recruitment is ongoing. To register, participants must first receive very bad news: results of your blood tests showing that their chances of developing the disease are high.
"When I got the news, I was devastated," Hayden said.
"It has daily reminders. Go get your brother what happens," says the mother of children, Myra Murphy.
So now Hayden Murphy takes a small white capsule daily and blood is tested periodically for signs of diabetes.
A small preliminary study that was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that might work.
Children who took two pills of insulin showed changes in their immune system that researchers say could help prevent diabetes. The study was very small and did not last long for sure.
The ongoing study is more rigorous and assigns participants randomly experimental insulin capsules or a placebo, and should provide a clearer answer.
Does prevents indefinitely? Does decreases, delays diabetes? That could also be a great victory, "said Dr. Louis Philipson, a diabetes specialist at the University of Chicago involved in the study.
"We know very little about the precise mechanisms that cause Type 1 diabetes," which complicates efforts to prevent it, said Dr. Desmond Schatz, director of the study and medical director of the diabetes center at the University of Florida.
Dr. Wendy Brickman a diabetes specialist at Children's Hospital Lurie, of Chicago, which is involved in the study, said researchers believe that taking insulin orally for it to be digested as food could mislead the damaged immune system not to attack cells that produce insulin.
If pills prevention work is likely to be less expensive than having lifetime diabetes, said Lisa Spain, and scientific program director of the National Institutes of Health, which funded prevention research. The results of the study are expected by 2017.
Hayden Murphy and his family are cautiously optimistic; after three years in the study, he has shown no signs of diabetes.
