November 10th, 2011 by KerriSparling in Opinion
No Comments »
Last week (was it only a week ago? My time-space continuum is completely off kilter these days), I was out in San Francisco for a quick visit at the Lifescan Town Hall meeting.
Okay, I was actually in Milpitas, which is a nice little place that the driver from the airport inadvertently described as, “Why are you going there?” Not exactly the same excitement as the home of the Golden Gate Bridge and other sights I saw from the car, but close.
I was asked to come out and talk about life with diabetes to a large group of Lifescan employees (they make the One Touch meters and they clearly like people who play guitar because Crystal Bowersox and B.B. King are their buddies, so I felt a little musically inept). I wasn’t asked to talk about my meter, or my pump, or to pimp out any partnerships, etc. They just wanted to hear about life with diabetes. Plain life. Real life.
Because I don’t have a formal bone in my body (all of my bones are in sweatpants and baseball caps), and because I didn’t have any airs to put on, I just stood on that stage showed them our community. I showed them some of our blogs, and talked about some of our meet-ups. I showed them that while life with diabetes can be challenging, Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
November 4th, 2011 by KerriSparling in True Stories
No Comments »
A few weeks ago, I posted a photo and part of an email from a reader who had made an insulin pump-shaped cake for their daughter’s birthday. In that magical way of the Internet (where cats haz a cheeseburger and lovely little bean people talk about diabetes), another family with a kid pumping insulin caught the post, and baked up a little bolus of their own.
So, to kick off Diabetes Month here, I connected with Gwyneth’s mom, and Gwyneth emailed me her perspective on what it’s like to mark her first diaversary, which is TODAY. At the start of Diabetes Month. How’s that for timing? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
November 3rd, 2011 by Medgadget in Research
No Comments »
Medtronic received the go-ahead to begin an at-home U.S. trial of its Low Glucose Suspend technology that aims to prevent hypoglycemia by automatically stopping basal insulin delivery when measured glucose reaches a critically low level.
The pump technology is already available in Europe on the company’s Paradigm Veo insulin pump.
This is the second phase of the ASPIRE (Automation to Simulate Pancreatic Insulin REsponse) study, following the completion of the in-patient clinical study. ASPIRE is a multi-center, randomized, pivotal in-home study being conducted at multiple investigational centers to determine the safety and efficacy of the Low Glucose Suspend feature in the sensor-augmented MiniMed Paradigm insulin pump. Medtronic’s newest continuous glucose sensor, the Enlite™ sensor, will be tested as part of the overall system.
ASPIRE will compare Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
November 1st, 2011 by PJSkerrett in Opinion, Research
No Comments »
Heart disease. Stroke. Diabetes. Asthma. Osteoporosis. These common scourges are often pegged to genes, pollution, or the wear and tear caused by personal choices like a poor diet, smoking, or too little exercise. David Barker, a British physician and epidemiologist, has a different and compelling idea: these and other conditions stem from a developing baby’s environment, mainly the womb and the placenta.
Barker was the invited speaker at this year’s Stare-Hegsted Lecture, which is a big deal at the Harvard School of Public Health. In just over an hour, he covered the basics of what the British Medical Journal used to call the Barker hypothesis. It has since come to be known as the developmental origins of chronic disease. (You can watch the entire talk here.)
It goes like this: During the first thousand days of development, from conception to age 2, the body’s tissues, organs, and systems are exquisitely sensitive to conditions in their environment during various windows of time. A lack of nutrients or an overabundance of them during these windows programs a child’s development and sets the stage for health or disease. Barker and others use low body weight at term birth is a marker for poor fetal nutrition.
When a fetus is faced with a poor food supply, it Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
October 30th, 2011 by John Mandrola, M.D. in Research
No Comments »
You don’t want this…
When it comes to the risk of stroke in atrial fibrillation, it pays to be a boy. Sorry, ladies.
An important question came up on my recent post on AF and stroke.
Why does being female give you an automatic point on CHADS2-VASc? I keep seeing it, but I don’t see why that is.
It doesn’t seem intuitive that female AF patients should have more strokes. Why? AF should equal AF.
But it does matter. When it comes to AF and stroke, women are very different.
Here are three references that support the fact that female gender increases the risk of stroke in AF.
–First: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr John M*
