Indian Study Suggests Collagen May Worsen Type 2 Diabetes

Imagine your body's cells have a little neighborhood called the pancreas, which makes insulin to help your body use sugar.

In Type 2 diabetes, this neighborhood doesn't work as well.

Scientists found that a building material in this neighborhood, called collagen, might be making things worse.

Collagen helps build things, but it seems it might also help sticky blobs called amylin stick together.

These sticky blobs can hurt the cells that make insulin.

The study, done in India where lots of people have diabetes, saw that both collagen and amylin went up as diabetes got worse.

They even saw that when insulin-making cells were grown on collagen, they got more stressed.

This means that when we think about diabetes, we might need to consider this building material, collagen, and not just the insulin itself.

It's still early research, so it doesn't mean you should stop using collagen products, but it's something doctors should know about, especially for patients not getting better with regular treatments.

More research is needed to see if changing collagen could become a new way to help treat diabetes.