Thirty years of research show that exercising and eating lower fat, fiber-rich foods can at least delay diabetes. They discovered an extremely high rate of diabetes among the Pima Indians. Two years later, the Institute, the Indian Health Service, and the Pima community set out to find some answers to this mystery. Three decades' collective efforts by scientists and volunteers have laid the foundation for eventually curing or preventing diabetes and its complications. The work begun in 1965 has yielded a definition of diabetes that is now used worldwide, and set out diagnostic criteria used by doctors from Sacaton, Arizona to Sicily to identify and treat diabetes and to anticipate how it is likely to develop.
Doctors can best treat a disease when they understand what causes it and how it progresses.
By studying Pima volunteers for many years, NIH doctors learned that unhealthy weight is a strong predictor of diabetes. Eighty percent of people with diabetes are overweight. They also discovered that high levels of insulin in the blood, or hyper-insulinemia, is another strong risk factor. Studying this clue, researchers working with patients found that high levels of insulin were linked to insulin resistance. Normally, the pancreas releases insulin to regulate the amount of sugar or glucose in the blood.