Around 5% of people may achieve remission from type 2 diabetes

The results may help doctors effectively support those who currently have or are at high risk for developing type 2 diabetes.
DiabetesTrusted Source is a major global health concern, affecting mortality rates and the quality of life of those with the condition and their families.

While numerous treatment options exist to control the disease, many people go beyond managing their illness to achieve remission.

A new study using data from Scotland finds that a significant number of people with a type 2 diabetes diagnosis are in remission. The researchers also sought to define the factors that drive remission.

Scientists do not know how exactly vitamin D levels might influence multiple health conditions. Some have suggested it may protect against cancer by regulating cadherins, which are proteins involved in cell-cell adhesion responsible for maintaining tissue architecture and regulation of cell growth and differentiation.

Despite this, several large randomized trialsTrusted Source have not been able to find evidence that vitamin D supplementation for vitamin D deficiency has any benefit for cancer or cardiovascular disease.

This has made researchers question whether vitamin D levels really play a part in reducing the risk of these diseases or whether healthier people have naturally higher levels of the vitamin for other reasons.

Researchers led by the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom conducted a study to see whether inherited genetic variants predisposing people to have higher vitamin D levels play a role in overall health.

“Our investigation provides intriguing new evidence that suggests raising vitamin D levels may reduce the risk of major disease and mortality, but only for people who have low vitamin D levels,” says Dr. Stephen Burgess, lead author of the study.

“Maintaining adequate levels of vitamin D is important, but there appears to be no benefit in supplementation beyond a threshold level,” he adds.

“Hang in there everyone,” he wrote. Facebook should allow for peaceful discussion of the riot but not calls for violence, he added.

His post was met with scathing replies from employees who blamed the company for what was happening.

“I’m struggling to match my values to my employment here,” an employee wrote in a comment. (The employee’s name was redacted in a version seen by NBC News.) “I came here hoping to effect change and improve society, but all I’ve seen is atrophy and abdication of responsibility.”

Another employee asked, “How are we expected to ignore when leadership overrides research-based policy decisions to better serve people like the groups inciting violence today?”

The comments openly challenged the company’s leadership with a not-so-subtle message: Facebook’s well-documented problems in abetting violent polarization and encouraging the spread of misinformation weren’t getting fixed, despite the company’s investments and promises.

The comments are in thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents given to NBC News detailing Facebook’s internal debates around the societal impact of its platforms. Together the documents offer the deepest look provided to outsiders at the internal workings of the world’s largest social media company.

They are a small fraction of the internal communications over the past several years at Facebook, where employee message boards that started as a way to embrace transparency have become an outlet for reflection and advocacy on the impact of social media.

The documents show employees — many who were hired to help Facebook address problems on its platforms — debating with one another on internal message boards free of public relations spin. Many tried to figure out how to turn stalled bureaucratic wheels and steer a company that now has so many departments that employees sometimes aren’t aware of overlapping responsibilities. Some employees defended management, with one calling Facebook executives “brilliant, data-driven futurists like many of us.”

For the study, each of the 24,699 participants completed questionnaires on two occasions. For these questionnaires, they recalled all the foods they had eaten during the previous 24 hours.

The participants who were most likely to be mushroom eaters were college-educated, non-Hispanic white women.

The overall incidence of depression among the entire study cohort was 5.9%.

Mushroom eaters constituted 5.2% of the participants. The researchers divided these mushroom eaters into three groups according to the extent of their mushroom consumption.

Those who ate a median amount of mushrooms (4.9 grams [g] per day) were the only group to experience a reduction in the likelihood of depression.

Curiously, the researchers did not observe a similar reduction in depression for those who ate the most mushrooms (19.6 g each day), suggesting that a median intake constitutes the sweet spot for relief from depression.

On the other hand, Dr. Muscat speculated, “The number of study participants [who] consumed a half-a-serving size of mushrooms or more was quite small, so it could just be statistical variation.”

“Alternatively,” he added, “if mushrooms prevented depression, you would expect to see a greater effect in those who consumed the most, so either the protective effect in the middle consumption group is not real, or there are other factors that are obscuring the association in the highest tertile that we just don’t know about.”

Possible underlying mechanisms
The researchers hypothesize that the antidepressant properties of mushrooms may be related to specific compounds present in the fungi.