Diabetes Self-Management March - April 2017

The dawn of spring presents an opportunity to reflect on your lifestyle and evaluate any aspect that could use a refresh. Dear Readers, BELIEVE IT OR NOT, spring is around the corner! The melting snow, rising temperatures and increasing daylight provide the perfect backdrop for a recharge, whether it be to your diabetes management, diet or exercise routine. The dawn of spring presents an opportunity to reflect on your lifestyle and evaluate any aspect that could use a refresh. This New Products issue of Diabetes Self-Management features not only innovative diabetes-management tools (page 24) but also what’s new—and relevant to you—in research (page 39). These two areas overlap in our article on closed-loop insulin delivery (page 48), which covers the concept and research that went into developing the first such…

For years, researchers have been looking for safe and effective ways to fight anemia. Until now, their main focus has been on prescription drugs. Unfortunately, the drugs being used today aren’t necessarily the most effective or safe way to fight anemia. Let me explain. Recently, there was a landmark clinical trial by the American Society of Nephrology. The results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The trial found that an anemia drug, Aranesp, nearly doubled the risk of stroke. It also increased the risks of blood clots and cancer. Dr. Ajay K. Singh, a nephrologist at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said that the new findings “turned the world of anemia management upside down.” Debbie Cafarelli discovered the risks of prescription drugs first-hand when her…

Many people have Type 1 diabetes for a long time without knowing it. Sometimes, they don’t find out until they’re in the emergency room with dangerous complications. For that reason, three medical organizations—the JDRF (formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation), the American Diabetes Association and the Endocrine Society—recently recommended adopting a new Type 1 diabetes staging classification. They based their proposal on 20 years of research conducted by an international network called Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet. This research involved 150,000 relatives of someone who had Type 1 diabetes. The goal was to promote early diagnosis and prevention of Type 1 diabetes by focusing on the early stages of the disease. The recommended new classification describes Type 1 diabetes as having three distinct stages. • Stage 1: The immune system has…

Many treatments can help people with diabetes, but they can’t do any good if people don’t take them. Patients who fail to take their prescriptions as directed have poor “medication adherence,” and it’s an issue in the medical community. Physicians can sometimes be frustrated by patients who are careless about taking their medications. For that reason, the U.S. division of the global pharmaceutical company Sanofi is partnering with the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) and the Center for Assessment Technology and Continuous Health (CATCH) at Massachusetts General Hospital to develop new ways of predicting how people with Type 2 diabetes will adhere to their medication schedule. The plan is to utilize and analyze predictive analytics—“big data”—to develop ways of forecasting medication adherence. CATCH and DCRI are using what they call…

INSULIN ANALOG A form of insulin in which the insulin molecule has been altered to create a specific desired effect in the human body. The two basic types of insulin analogs are those that act more rapidly than natural insulin when injected subcutaneously and those that work for a longer period of time than natural insulin. The first insulin analog on the market was insulin lispro, a rapid-acting insulin analog developed and marketed by Eli Lilly and Company under the brand name Humalog. Insulin lispro is genetically engineered by reversing the amino acids lysine and proline in key positions in the insulin molecule so that the molecules are less likely to bind to one another and are absorbed more easily into the bloodstream. Other rapid-acting insulin analogs include insulin aspart,…

The rising incidence of diabetes around the world has been news for a while, but for the first time, someone has put a dollar figure on it. The results are pretty amazing. According to an analysis by the consulting firm GlobalData, the global Type 2 diabetes market is predicted to nearly double in the next decade—from $31.2 billion to $58.75 billion in 2025. The report uses data from the nine major diabetes markets: the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan, China and India. The study also determined that the country expected to be most affected is the United States, which is predicted to increase its global market share from 58 percent to 66 percent. Much of this rise will be due to the increasing incidence and…