A worm to catch diabetes?

Key points:

• Countries with higher rates of routine human worm infection had reduced rates of type two diabetes

• James Cook University’s Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine successfully trialled worm infection to combat metabolic conditions in a world-first study

• When the two-year study concluded, participants who were infected had expressed that they wished to keep their worms due to the positive outcome

Researchers at James Cook University’s Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine have recently published the outcome of a trial which looked at hookworm infection as a means to combat metabolic disease.

The two-year trial involved 40 participants with early warning signs of cardiovascular disease or type two diabetes, with each person given 20 to 40 hookworm larvae or a placebo. Researchers sought to determine whether worms could play a protective role in improved insulin resistance for people at risk of metabolic conditions. The research was prompted by a lower rate of type two diabetes in countries with higher rates of routine worm infection.

Those who were infected with the larvae noted significant improvements in overall health, mood and metabolic well-being — which researchers believed to be a side-effect of the parasitic worm protecting it’s host. Those treated with 20 worms also lost weight over two years, in addition to ‘remarkable’ changes in how patients personally felt — a welcomed shock to researchers who began the clinical trial at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than half a billion adults have already been diagnosed with type two diabetes worldwide and older people are particularly vulnerable to developing the condition. In Australia, one-in-five people over the age of 75 live with diabetes and in general, older Australians were four times more likely to develop the disease than the average Australian.

Lead researcher Dr Doris Pierce told newsGP that following the two-year trial, all but one participant expressed that they would like to keep the infection, rather than take the deworming medication — an outcome which had excited the research team.

Although 44 percent of people in the test group experienced gastrointestinal symptoms — bloating, nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhoea, epigastric upset, hunger, stomach cramps and abdominal pain — the vast majority of symptoms were mild to moderate in severity and resolved quickly, without medical intervention.

The study overview, published in Nature Communications, affirmed the safety, efficacy and need for ongoing testing with larger sample sizes, in the hope of discovering the relationship between body mass decrease, hookworms and insulin resistance.

The James Cook University and The Prince Charles Hospital had previously tested hookworm infection as a remedy in coeliac disease, having found hookworm-treated participants tended to have improved tolerance to lower doses of gluten, with fewer coeliac symptoms and improved quality of life.

What do you think? Would you live with worms to prevent type two diabetes or does the thought make you squirm? Let the team at Talking Aged Care know how you manage your diabetes.