As people's waistlines increase, so does the incidence of type 2 diabetes. Now scientists have a better understanding of exactly what happens in the body that leads up to type 2 diabetes, and what likely causes some of the complications related to the disease. Specifically, scientists from Denmark have found that in mice, macrophages, a specific type of immune cell, invade the diabetic pancreatic tissue during the early stages of the disease. Then, these inflammatory cells produce a large amount of pro-inflammatory proteins, called cytokines, which directly contribute to the elimination of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas, resulting in diabetes. This discovery was published in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology.
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