April 21, 2010
WEDNESDAY, April 21 (HealthDay News) — Teens with type 1 diabetes may need help as they begin taking more responsibility for monitoring their blood glucose levels and administering insulin, a new study suggests.
Researchers monitored 147 diabetic teens for six months. Overall, conflict levels between parent and child stayed fairly steady during this time. But, the study found that younger teens who started taking more responsibility for their own care and who had more conflict with parents became less diligent about monitoring their blood glucose levels and had increased levels of hemoglobin A1c — a measure of how well blood glucose has been controlled over time. Read More
April 15, 2010
WEDNESDAY, April 14 (HealthDay News) — The first human trials of the latest design of an artificial pancreas for people with type 1 diabetes found the device worked without causing low blood sugar (hypoglycemia).
Ideally, this type of automated device would finally free people with type 1 diabetes from the insulin injections that many require each day, while relieving them of the constant need to check blood sugar levels and monitor the food they eat accordingly. Read More
April 8, 2010
THURSDAY, April 8 (HealthDay News) — Canadian researchers have successfully reversed type 1 diabetes in mice using a new vaccine technology that appears to solely target the immune system cells responsible for the disease.
“The body has built-in mechanisms that try to counter disease progression, and we now have a mechanism that can be [used] to selectively blunt an immune response without causing a systemic response,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Pere Santamaria, a professor at the Julia McFarlane Diabetes Research Centre at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Read More
March 1, 2010
MONDAY, March 1 (HealthDay News) — Researchers are reporting that treatment with a hormone linked to weight loss seems to control type 1 diabetes in mice better than insulin does, raising the prospect of a landmark new treatment for some human diabetics.
There’s no guarantee that the hormone, known as leptin, will work against type 1 diabetes. But if leptin has similar effects on humans, it could free type 1 diabetics from their daily regimen of multiple insulin injections and tight blood-sugar monitoring, said the study’s co-author, Dr. Roger Unger, chairman of diabetes research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Read More
January 14, 2010
WEDNESDAY, Jan. 13 (HealthDay News) — The first version of an artificial pancreas — a potentially revolutionary way to manage insulin delivery in people with type 1 diabetes — may be available in as little as four years.
The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) announced Wednesday that it’s partnering with Johnson & Johnson’s insulin pump division, Animas Corp., to begin development of the first artificial pancreas system. The goal is to have a prototype ready for regulatory review in about four years. Read More
October 23, 2009
FRIDAY, Oct. 23 (HealthDay News) — The diabetes drug liraglutide helps obese people without diabetes lose weight, researchers have found.
The study authors also reported that high doses of liraglutide were more effective at helping people shed pounds than the weight-loss drug orlistat.
In the study, which included 564 diabetes-free obese patients aged 18 to 65 at 19 sites in Europe, participants were randomly selected to receive one of four injected doses of liraglutide (1.2 milligrams, 1.8 milligrams, 2.4 milligrams or 3 milligrams) or a placebo once a day, or 120 milligrams of orlistat three times a day. Read More
August 27, 2009
WEDNESDAY, Aug. 26 (HealthDay News) — An abnormal immune response to wheat proteins may contribute to type 1 diabetes, Canadian researchers say.
Their study of 42 people with type 1 diabetes found that nearly half had immune system T-cells that overreacted to wheat. The researchers also identified genes associated with this abnormal immune response. Read More
July 6, 2009
THURSDAY, July 2 (HealthDay News) — Children with type 1 diabetes are more likely to be overweight than those without the disease, increasing their risk of serious health complications, researchers say.
The finding is from a major study that explored the weight problems faced by U.S. youngsters with type 1 diabetes, a less common form of the disease that usually shows up in childhood or in young adults. The study, part of the “Search for Diabetes in Youth Study Group,” was reported online in the journal Pediatric Diabetes. Read More
May 28, 2009
WEDNESDAY, May 27 (HealthDay News) — If current trends continue, cases of type 1 diabetes among European children under 15 will increase by 70 percent by the year 2020, a new study suggests.
Those are among the findings by researchers who analyzed diabetes data from 20 centers in 17 European countries. Those centers registered 29,311 cases of type 1 diabetes between 1989 and 2003. Read More
April 14, 2009
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By Karen Pallarito
TUESDAY, April 14, 2009 (Health.com) — A handful of people with type 1 diabetes have been able to survive without insulin shots for more than 2-1/2 years, on average, after having their own blood stem cells removed and reimplanted through intravenous injection, U.S. and Brazilian researchers reported on Tuesday.
Overall, the technique has been tried in 23 people, mostly boys and young men, who were treated within six weeks of a new diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. People who have type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease that destroys the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, typically need insulin shots to survive. (People with type 1 make up only about 10% of all diabetics; most people have type 2, which can be controlled with diet, exercise, oral drugs, or insulin shots.) Read More
