People with type 2 diabetes are often prescribed several drugs to help them control their blood sugar as well as conditions related to diabetes, such as high cholesterol and high blood pressure. However, startling research findings presented at the annual scientific meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Antonio, Texas, suggest that many, if not most, of these patients do not take all the medication they are prescribed. “We ask a lot of our diabetic patients,” stated Andrew Morris, MD of the University of Dundee in Scotland. He described a “typical diabetes patient” from his practice who was taking two drugs for her blood sugar, one for her high cholesterol, …
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Diabetics who inject themselves with insulin several times a day are eager for news about inhaled insulin, which has been in clinical trials in the United States for several years. They’ll be glad to hear that inhaling insulin, rather than injecting it, may not be too far in the future. The results of several studies were presented at the scientific sessions of the American Diabetes Association in San Antonio, Texas. Several reported on the bioavailability of inhaled insulin — how quickly it becomes available for the body to use — and several more reported on effectiveness and patient satisfaction when used by those with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. More …
[ Continue Reading... ]Public awareness of the importance of treating high blood pressure has actually gone down in the past decade, and so has the percentage of people with this condition who are treating it successfully, according to a nationally recognized expert in this area. The potential consequences of this lack of awareness and appropriate treatment: increased rates of cardiovascular disease and death. Jerome D. Cohen, M.D. of the St. Louis University Health Sciences Center in Missouri, talked to a group of physicians about treating hypertension this week during the annual meeting of the American College of Physicians/American Society for Internal Medicine, in Philadelphia. According to Cohen, there are three groups of patients that …
[ Continue Reading... ]Ordinarily, the organ most associated with diabetes is the pancreas. After all, that’s where insulin is made. However, researchers from Boston suggest that the liver deserves a closer look. This team of researchers bred genetically altered mice, so the insulin receptor cells in their livers would not respond to insulin. Under normal conditions, when an increase in insulin is detected the liver stops producing glucose and starts storing excess glucose as glycogen in your liver and muscles. Both processes lower your blood sugar level. Since the mice livers couldn’t detect whether or not insulin was present, the liver had no way of knowing how much glucose was in the blood. A …
[ Continue Reading... ]Standards of therapy call for women who are taking oral hypoglycemic agents to change to insulin when they become pregnant. If a woman develops gestational diabetes that can’t be controlled with diet and exercise, she too is put on insulin. Researchers at the University of Texas have completed a study challenging this premise. The goal of any diabetic therapy is to control hyperglycemia. In pregnant women, this is particularly important. Glucose passes through the placenta, but insulin doesn’t. High glucose levels in fetal circulation can overwhelm the fetus’s capacity to make insulin. The excess glucose results in macrosomia (large baby) as well as birth defects and sometimes stillbirth. Macrosomic babies have …
[ Continue Reading... ]A new report suggests that most Type II diabetics need a variety of therapies to maintain proper long-term blood sugar control. Researchers involved with the United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study Group followed the cases of more than 4,000 Type II diabetics treated with diet alone or with drugs, such as insulin, sulfonylurea, or metformin to collect data. It was found that only 50 percent of patients treated with a single therapy maintained proper blood-sugar control three years after the study began; after nine years only 42 percent of people treated with insulin alone had control, 24 percent of those treated with sulfonylurea alone had , and eight percent of those treated …
[ Continue Reading... ]As anyone with diabetes can tell you, pricking your finger several times a day to monitor blood sugar is no fun. But a recent study reports that a painless method of getting these essential measurements may be on the way. Diabetics monitor their blood sugar so they’ll know when to take insulin. Up to now, this has to be done by pricking the finger and squeezing a drop of blood onto a test strip, But according to Robert Gabbay, MD, PhD, of the Pennsylvania State University’s School of Medicine, a new method using ultrasound may get rid of most of these finger-sticks. “This method involves no needles and is completely painless,” …
[ Continue Reading... ]The medical literature is replete with research showing that women who’ve been diabetic for a long time are likely to develop osteoporosis. Researchers at the University of Buffalo have recently completed a study indicating that this bone loss in diabetic girls begins after they enter their teens. The study involved two groups of 15 adolescent girls, aged 13 to 19. One group of girls had insulin dependent diabetes for at least five years, the other group did not have diabetes. Bone density of the girls was measured at the hip, spine, and wrist. A total body bone mineral density measurement was also taken. The diabetic girl’s bone density was within normal …
[ Continue Reading... ]Past research has shown that people with type 2 diabetes have at least twice the risk of developing coronary heart disease as those without diabetes. And once diabetics develop heart disease, their prognosis is worse than non-diabetics. Therefore, doing what it takes to avoid heart disease is important. This includes not only keeping the blood sugar within normal limits, but maintaining healthy cholesterol levels as well. Ideally, a low-fat diet alone will lower cholesterol, but when this fails, patients should take cholesterol-lowering medication, according to a study at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. The study examined data gathered by a Scandanavian trial that investigated the ability …
[ Continue Reading... ]In most cases, depression precedes the development of diabetes. Researchers from Washington University and the University of Oregon presented these findings from multiple studies regarding depression and Type II diabetes. Although the link between depression and diabetes is well known, the order of the association was thought to be the same as for other chronic illnesses. Once a chronic illness begins to have a negative impact on people’s lives, they are more prone to depression. This holds true for diabetes, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, or any other disease. In the course of trying to measure the quality-of-life for a diabetic who is also depressed, these research teams discovered that in as …
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