2023-08-04 04:45:48
Parasitic necator worms help you lose weight and restore your cells’ ability to sense insulin and absorb glucose from the blood.
Type 2 diabetes begins when cells lose their sensitivity to insulin. It causes cells to absorb glucose, but if they are insensitive to it (or, as they say, tolerant), the blood sugar level begins to rise, and this leads to severe physiological consequences. The pancreas tries to cope with the problem by increasing the level of insulin, but at some point, its cells that synthesize insulin begin to fail.
Head of the parasitic worm Necator americanus. (Photo: CDC / Dr. Mae Melvin)
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Type 2 diabetes has various causes, most often being overweight, which, in turn, arises from malnutrition, is cited as one of the main risk factors. At the same time, it is known that immunity also plays a role here, more precisely, a sluggish inflammatory reaction dispersed throughout the body. Such inflammation can occur both due to one’s own immune abnormalities, and for any specific reason. For example, a few years ago we wrote that inflammation is triggered in response to the death of fat cells, which begin to die too actively when overweight. And the sluggish inflammation that has already begun increases the insensitivity of cells to insulin.
The conclusion suggests itself that if inflammation is brought down, then diabetes can be weakened, if not completely prevented. And here are the researchers James Cook University offer in Nature Communications a peculiar way of doing this is with the parasitic worms Necator americanus, or the New World hookworm. The article describes clinical experiments with humans – there have already been experiments on animals, and even before special experiments, it was noticed that parasitic worms suppress the inflammatory response. In fact, this is not so surprising: the immune system reacts to parasites, and in order to live safely in the host, they need to calm down its immune system somehow. Over the millennia of evolution, necator worms have learned to suppress immune attacks against themselves.
It is also known from earlier research that people and animals that are rid of parasites have increased blood sugar levels, worsened fat metabolism, and some other not-so-good metabolic changes. But so far no one has tested whether it is possible to improve metabolism by targeted and controlled worm infestation. Forty adult men and women who had initial signs of diabetes were invited to the experiment. Twenty-seven of them were planted on the skin of N. americanus larvae in the amount of twenty or forty pieces. The larvae penetrated a person, developed into adult worms and began to multiply – this was evident both in immune parameters and in worm eggs in feces. Immunity, as expected, increased the level of special antiparasitic cells and molecular signals, but at the same time, some pro-inflammatory signaling proteins became less in the blood. The subjects were observed for two years, and it turned out that twenty larvae were already enough to reduce insulin insensitivity after a year, and after two years, body weight decreased. The participants in the experiment themselves said that they began to feel better with the worms.
Generally speaking, necator worms cause the disease necatoriasis, the symptoms of which range from nausea and diarrhea to anemia and damage to the nervous system. But it all depends on how strong the parasite infection is. The subjects had nausea, bloating, and digestive problems – the worms parasitize in the intestines, and when they get to the intestines and take root in it, such symptoms are to be expected. However, in this case, the symptoms were either mild or moderate, and resolved without any medical intervention. Only three people with intestines became noticeably ill, and the worms had to be expelled from them. But of the three, only two had severe symptoms, which suggests that the third reason for feeling unwell was something else. In most cases, as was said, something like neutrality was established between the worms and the organism – perhaps due to the fact that there were few worms initially. By the way, two years later, the participants in the experiment were offered to get rid of necators, but all but one decided to continue living with worms inside.
Strictly speaking, the worms here were not so much treating diabetes as preventing it in people who were about to get it. It would be interesting to test the effect of necators in patients with already developed diabetes – it is unlikely that the worms will be able to get rid of it, but perhaps they will alleviate its symptoms and enhance the effect of antidiabetic drugs. In general, necators are not the only parasitic worms that can be beneficial: we once wrote that whipworms protect the intestines from Crohn’s disease, tapeworms protect the brain from inflammation, and roundworms help get pregnant.
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