Pancreatic lesions in acute experimental Chagas' disease

Abstract

Parasitism is the main cause of acute pancreatitis in Chagas' disease.

Alterations in pancreatic β cell function and Trypanosoma cruzi infection: evidence from human and animal studies

“…Islets were disorganized with smaller and ‘pale’ α and β cells, in which the nuclei were smaller in volume. Presence of amastigotes in both the endocrine and exocrine pancreas were confirmed in infected mice in a separate study (Corbett et al 2002). These authors noted fat necrosis in the exocrine pancreas, which they attributed to duct and acinar cell destruction secondary to lysis of T. cruzi pseudocysts.…”

Trypanosoma cruzi infection alters glucose metabolism at rest and during exercise without modifying the morphology of pancreatic islets in rats

“…However, the karyometric parameters of the ␤ cells in the IG animals were markedly reduced compared to the CG animals. From a morphological point of view, in the case of pancreatitis caused by T. cruzi, several other hypotheses can be used in an attempt to explain the dysfunction in glucose kinetics, such as hypoinsulinemia caused by insulitis, chronic inflammation with pancreatic fibrosis and microvascular damage, and parasympathetic denervation of pancreatic islets with the predominance of sympathetic stimuli [7,26,34,35]. Similar mechanisms have been described in other severe protozoan infections, such as malaria [6,34].…”

“…Although there is sufficient evidence showing that T. cruzi is able to spread and infect several organs such as the gonads, kidney, liver and pancreas in humans [30,32] and animals [7,33,34], these infection sites have not been researched to the same extent as cardiac and intestinal manifestations, and thus remain neglected. Some studies addressed the involvement of the pancreas in ChD [7,30,[32][33][34]. Traditionally, this observation has been based on evidence of altered glucose and insulin responses after oral glucose tolerance tests in chronic chagasic patients and post-mortem histopathological analyses of the pancreas [18,35,37].…”

Sanitation for all: the global opportunity to increase transgenerational health gains and better understand the link between NCDs and NTDs, a scoping review

“…The risk of development of diabetes is observed to be higher in women with chagas cardiomyopathy than those with chagas disease alone [ 53 ]. This may be due to the physiological and morphological changes in pancreas from chagas disease [ 54 , 55 ].…”