The American Diabetes Association (ADA) published another update to its standards. What’s the ADA Diabetes Standards of Care and why is it important? For over 30 years, this living document has been developed by the ADA. It is important because it looks at research conducted over the last year to learn and share what the best quality of care is...
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Insulin was first extracted from cattle and pig pancreas. It took 8,000 pounds of pancreas from 23,500 animals to make one pound of insulin. In 1978, Eli Lilly needed 56 million animals to meet the US demand for insulin. Everything changed when, Genentech used recombinant DNA technology to create synthetic human insulin (now called human insulin). The...
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And the prices of other medications in the US Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. That means that the person’s immune system attacks and destroys the cells in the pancreas (beta cells) that make insulin. Once those cells are destroyed, they don’t grow back. Type 1 diabetes is usually diagnosed in young people, before the age of 30, and most often...
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What’s A Diabetes Kit? If you or someone you care for has Type 1 Diabetes, creating a kit is a must. Highs and lows are part of life, especially for children and adolescents with Type 1 diabetes, simply because they are growing. A diabetes kit is a collection of the tools you need to deal with the extreme highs and lows that can happen with Type one...
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Being Remarkable Why the superlative? One word-*Energy*! It is what the pancreas is all about! It’s job is to make sure that each and every cell in the body has the energy it needs to function. This organ, located behind the stomach, is involved first in digestion, and second in maintaining glucose levels in the blood. In medical terms these are...
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Heroes are people who have the courage to turn challenges into advocacy. “Our life is made up of numbers.” Meri Schuhmacher is the mother of four sons: three of them have Type 1 diabetes. What is a typical day for Meri? “Our life is made up of numbers,” she says. She describes her day around blood glucose checks, “Nighttime blood...
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Before humans are involved in clinical trials, a lot of animal testing occurs. When something works in animals, there is hope that it will work in people. That’s why the news of nanotechnology applied to diabetes in animals is interesting. Diabetes Research The work is being done through a cooperative effort between North Carolina State University and...
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