Treating diabetes often involves daily pills or insulin injections, but a study published this week (October 6) in Cell Metabolism presents another potential treatment option: electromagnetic fields. Researchers found that exposing mice with type 2 diabetes to static electric and magnetic fields increases insulin sensitivity and lowers blood sugar.
The paper “is a noninvasive way of treating glycemia in animal models with diabetes, so I thought that was pretty remarkable,” says Juleen Zierath, who studies type 2 diabetes at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and was not involved in the study. “The authors did a really thorough job to convince themselves that what they were looking at was something worth investigating further, that it wasn’t just an artifact.”
Calvin Carter, a postdoc in Val Sheffield’s lab at the University of Iowa, didn’t believe the results at first himself, he says. Carter finished his PhD at the university in 2014 and ...
