My daughter Kaitlin was diagnosed with juvenile (or type 1) diabetes nearly 3 years ago right before her 12th birthday. It changed my life and made me realize that life is too short to be unhappy, which is why I am now a personal trainer and writer rather than a scientist at Sandia National Labs.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks its own insulin-producing cells. It typically appears in childhood, giving it its common name of juvenile diabetes. It is the lesser known type, affecting only 5 to 10% of those diagnosed as diabetic. Still, it affects as many as three million Americans, and more than 15,000 children are diagnosed with a new case of type 1 diabetes each year in the U.S. Regretfully, statistics show the rate of increase is on the rise.
Although great strides have been made toward improving the life of a diabetic with new types of insulins, improved blood glucose testing and monitoring devices, and greater success with transplantation, a cure still eludes us. Regardless, we have still come a very long way; before the discovery of insulin in the early 1920s, starvation was often prescribed as a treatment for type 1 diabetes and a diagnosis of diabetes was a certain death sentence.
Today, type 1 diabetics are living more comfortably through the introduction of the insulin pump, which delivers insulin through an infusion site beneath the skin which eliminates the need for syringes, improved blood glucose meters that require smaller quantities of blood and deliver more accurate results, and continuous glucose monitors, important to people who have lost their ability to sense blood sugar lows or people who might need tighter monitoring, such as infants or pregnant women.
In 1998 Dr. James Shapiro performed the first human islet transplantation using a less-toxic immune suppressing drug that greatly improves the success rate of transplanted insulin-producing cells. In 2006 the first generation of continuous glucose monitors received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in type 1 diabetics. And today (2011) researchers are close to perfecting the first artificial pancreas that integrates the insulin pump with the continuous glucose monitor to replicate the body’s pancreatic function. Still, none of these is a cure for type 1 diabetes, and doctors and researchers continue to test new drugs and experiment with existing drugs to search for one that can arrest or even reverse the pancreas’ loss of function.
For the latest research, please go to JDRF.org.
~Lori Dotson, CPT
President, DotsoFit, LLC
All Rights Reserved (2011)
