text_1: Novel Stem Cell Treatment May Hold Promise for Type 1 Diabetes
text_2: This story highlights the novelty of an experimental diabetes treatment. Yet despite cautionary statements from an independent source, the story portrays a preliminary safety test as being much more than it is. The story also should have told readers that this approach to overcoming insulin resistance may not be relevant to the overwhelming majority of people with diabetes, who do not use insulin. It’s also a bit misleading for the story to call this a “clinical trial” since there were only 3 controls and 15 patients. The history of medical research is littered with examples of treatments that seemed highly beneficial when tested in small numbers of patients, but then turned out to cause serious harms or failed to sustain the benefits when tested in larger numbers of people. This test was so small that the patients were outnumbered by the authors of the journal article. It is simply too soon to put much stock in these preliminary findings.