Diabetes Health Talk

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued an alert to healthcare professionals, reminding them that single-patient insulin pens shouldn’t be shared.

This is so dangerous! Insulin is specifically precribed for each diabetic and the insulin pens are for specific patients.

The FDA said insulin pens and insulin cartridges shouldn’t be used to administer medication to multiple patients due to the potential risk of transmitting blood-borne pathogens.

Officials explained insulin pens are pen-shaped injector devices that contain a disposable needle and either an insulin reservoir or an insulin cartridge. The devices typically contain enough insulin for a patient to self-administer several doses before the reservoir or cartridge is empty. All insulin pens are approved only for single-patient use.

The FDA said it has received reports of incidents at two unidentified hospitals in which the cartridge component of the insulin pens were used to administer medication to more than 2,000 people, although the disposable needles were reportedly changed among patients.

“Insulin pens are designed to be safe for one patient to use one pen multiple times with a new, fresh needle for each injection,” said Dr. Amy Egan, deputy director of safety at the FDA’s division of metabolism and endocrinology products. “Insulin pens are not designed, and are not safe, for one pen to be used by more than one patient, even if needles are changed between patients due to the risk of transmitting blood-borne pathogens.”

If sharing pens, one could transmit HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) amongh many different diseases. Please don’t take that chance.

Type 2 diabetes typically worsens over time as less and less insulin is produced by the pancreas. Usually, treatment for type 2 diabetes starts with lifestyle changes and a diabetes pill, such as metformin. Sulfonyureas and thiazolidinediones are other types of diabetes pills that can be considered, but both can cause weight gain, and sulfonyureas can cause more episodes of hypoglycemia (low blood glucose) than metformin.

Liraglutide is a new injectable diabetes medicine. It is now under development as a possible alternative to available diabetes pills. Researchers are performing studies to find out how liraglutide compares to other diabetes medicines.

Why did the researchers do this particular study?
The researchers wanted to compare the effectiveness and safety of adding liraglutide, glimepiride (a sulfonylurea), or a dummy pill to metformin treatment for people with type 2 diabetes.

Who was studied?
The study included more than 1,000 adults with type 2 diabetes who had been taking either one type of diabetes pill or more than one type of diabetes pill for more than 3 months.

How was the study done?
Participants received liraglutide injections, glimepiride pills, or dummy pills in combination with metformin for 26 weeks. Researchers measured the participants’ A1C and body weight at the start and end of the study and collected information about whether they experienced nausea or hypoglycemia while on the treatments.

What did the researchers find?
Adding liraglutide to metformin provided better diabetes control than metformin alone. The liraglutide-metformin combination controlled blood glucose as well as and caused less weight gain and hypoglycemia than a combination of glimepiride and metformin. Liraglutide caused more nausea than glimepiride, but the nausea declined over time.

What are the implications of the study?
Adding liraglutide to metformin may be a good treatment option for patients whose diabetes is not adequately controlled with metformin alone, especially when weight gain and hypoglycemia are a concern.

Great list from the American Diabetes Association:

1. Improve blood glucose management. Activity makes your body more sensitive to the insulin you make. Activity also burns glucose (calories). Both actions lower blood glucose.

2. Lower blood pressure. Activity helps your heart pump stronger and slower.

3. Improve blood fats. Exercise can raise good cholesterol (HDL) and lower bad cholesterol (LDL) and triglycerides. These changes are heart healthy.

4. Take less insulin or diabetes pills. Activity can lower blood glucose and weight. Both of these may lower how much insulin or diabetes pills you need to take.

5. Lose weight and keep it off. Activity burns calories. If you burn enough calories, you’ll trim a few pounds. Stay active and you’ll keep the weight off.

6. Lower risk for other health problems. Reduce your risk of a heart attack or stroke, some cancers, and bone loss.

7. Gain more energy and sleep better. You’ll get better sleep in less time and have more energy, too.

8. Relieve stress. Work out or walk off daily stress.

9. Build stronger bones and muscles. Weight-bearing activities, such as walking, make bones stronger. Strength-training activities, such as lifting light weights (or even cans of beans), make muscles strong.

10. Be more flexible. Move easier when you are active.

These tips aren’t just for Diabetics, though, if Diabetics needed motivation, show them this list, or take them to heart yourself.

As always, ask your health care provider what level of exercise you can do, safely. Walking is a great way to start. When I got back into walking after gaining significant weight, I could only walk a few yards, at most. Now I can walk for hours! Good Luck.

One of the best exercises Diabetics can do for themselves is walking.

Walking helps regulate blood sugar, keeps insulin levels in check, is great for your heart, helps lose weight, tone your body. The only investment is a comfortable pair of walking shoes and your time.

A comfortable daily walk is a good place to start if you want to live younger and longer.

But include a few spurts of power walking, too. This kind of “interval training” can be a great way to boost your exercise capacity — an emerging marker of longevity.

Build Up Your Steam
In a large study of women, exercise capacity — a measure of how hard you’re able to work out — was tightly connected with mortality rates. The women who had low exercise capacity were almost twice as likely to die during the study follow-up period, compared with the women who had more exercise power.

Boost Your Grade with Intervals
So how can you increase your exercise capacity? Interval training helps. Just add a few short bouts of more intense exercise to any moderately paced activity. For example, throw some 1- to 2-minute jogging sessions into a long, brisk walk. Or if you’re a steady biker, add a block of rapid pedaling here and there.

Whichever you choose, be sure to include intervals of fast and slow. Be sure to check your blood sugar if you’re feeling light-headed, dizzy or nauseous. This could be an indication your blood sugar has dropped. Carry hard candy (not sugar free this time) for these occasionas your blood sugar drops.

When a state judge ruled late last year that qualified nurses are the only school personnel who can give insulin shots to children with diabetes, he exacerbated an enormous problem.

Although I do not have kids, I would be upset at this ruling. I would probably hire a nurse to go to school and give my kids their insulin shots.

Most California schools do not have full-time nurses. Now, the parents of an estimated 15,000 diabetic children are scrambling — pushing school districts to hire nurses, driving to schools to administer the insulin shots and in some cases choosing home schooling.

Many doctors and diabetes advocates are outraged. Scores of lay people — babysitters, siblings, grandparents — regularly administer insulin, and they see no reason why trained, nonmedical school staff, like teachers or clerks, should not be allowed to help students. They fear the massive shortage of school nurses means children are not getting insulin shots in a timely manner. And they say diabetes is being used as a political tool to force school districts to hire more nurses — an unlikely scenario given the state’s $42 billion budget deficit.

“It’s untenable to expect nurses to be the sole provider of insulin in schools,” said Dr. Darrell Wilson, a pediatric endocrinologist at Stanford University and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. “To say that only a nurse can do this is spectacularly unnecessary. This is not a complicated procedure.”

In 2007, a class-action lawsuit against the California Department of Education produced an agreement that allowed nonmedical personnel to administer insulin injections to students if no nurse was available.

A cardiologist in Houston has come up with a special diet that reverses diabetes and heart disease, myfoxhouston.com reported.

Under the diet, Dr. Baxter Montgomery encourages patients to eat plant-based foods, minimally processed foods (that means all those foods that come prepared in a box or package), and to eat whole foods, as close to their natural state as possible.

For instance, you could shuck a corn on the cob and just eat it uncooked. He says it’s actually delicious that way, plus you get all the nutrients from it.

Dr. Montgomery also steers his patients away from meat, which he calls “animal flesh”. He says our digestive systems aren’t actually meant to digest meats and it puts an extra burden on the body.

More and more Doctors, Dieticians and Nutritionists are seeing the benefits of a low-carb, low-calorie, low-starch diet for Diabetics. Mostly plant-based, these meal plans for life (because ‘diets don’t work’) reduce and remove the underlying cause for diabetes and insulin resistance.

In my life, i’ve cut out most carbohydrates and starches, certainly no process foods and increased my vegetables and lean meats and fish. The old saying is true: Do most of your shopping on the outside perimeter of the store! All the processed, unhealthy foods are in the aisles. There is a noticible difference in my energy level. And my skin looks healthier, younger and more natural.

Make vegetables a main course or the big filler on your plate instead of meats, carbohydrates or starches. You will feel better, less likely to drowse off after eating and your blood sugar will thank you for it.

Is there a youth with diabetes in your life? If they are overwieght, chances are, they have tried using their diabetes type-1 or type-2 to lose weight.

More and more teenagers with diabetes type-1 or type-2 are skipping insulin shots or pills, fasting, using diet aids, vomiting or using laxatives in order to shed a few pounds. While they may be successful in shedding weight, many may not know the danger they are putting their health in.

They may be causing themselves heart, kidney, liver or eye problems or failure. Their heart and other organs must work harder to compensate by not taking care of themselves. Closely monitor their medications, if you must, to ensure they are taking the proper dosages at the proper times.

If they are concerned about weight loss, sit down and calmly discuss proper nutrition, exercise. Try not to turn it to a lecture, because that’s the surest way to lose their attention. What most people respond to is some listening to them and gently showing them proper eating and exercise habits. Will it happen overnight? No. But, it will happen, over time, by showing proper eating habits, fixing fresh foods with herbs and spices.

Find an activitiy that appeals to them: walking is the best activity known to humankind. There are many health benefits, and weight loss is among them. In 2007, I lost 41 pounds by cutting out fried, fatty, high colesterol foods and walking from 30-60 minutes every day. It’s just one pound a week (the FDA’s recommended weightloss).

Regular moderate exercise helps people with diabetes to reduce fat in their livers, in turn potentially preventing liver failure and heart disease, U.S. researchers said on Friday.

People with type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease and one closely tied to obesity, often have elevated liver fat levels and are at high risk for a condition called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

Diabetics who did a six-month program of cardiovascular exercise and weight lifting three times a week cut the fat in their livers by about 40 percent in the study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

They said the study, which used magnetic resonance imaging scans, is the first to show exercise can get fat out of the livers of people with type 2 diabetes.

“What we were able to demonstrate pretty definitively is that yet another benefit of exercise is to help reduce liver fat,” Johns Hopkins exercise physiologist Kerry Stewart said in a telephone interview.

Stewart presented the findings at an American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation meeting in Indianapolis.

The condition, also known as hepatic steatosis, can lead to cirrhosis of the liver, liver failure, liver cancer and a higher risk for diabetes-related heart problems.

Seventy-seven men and women with diabetes, most of whom were overweight or obese, took part in the study.

About half were assigned to moderate exercise including 45 minutes of running on a treadmill, using a stair-climbing machine or riding a bicycle for 45 minutes three times a week, along with 20 minutes of lifting weights.

The others were not placed in any formal fitness program, and most got little physical activity. At the end of six months, they had no improvement in liver fat.

Those in the exercise group also improved their overall fitness, shedding weight, gaining muscle strength and losing abdominal fat.

Type 2 diabetes is a growing problem in the United States and many other countries, fueled by increasing obesity. The American Diabetes Association said about 24 million people in the United States have diabetes, mostly type 2.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have transformed cells from human skin into cells that produce insulin, the hormone used to treat diabetes.

The breakthrough may one day lead to new treatments or even a cure for the millions of people affected by the disease, researchers say.

The approach involves reprogramming skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, or cells that can give rise to any other fetal or adult cell type, and then inducing them to differentiate, or transform, into cells that perform a particular function – in this case, secreting insulin.

Several recent studies have shown that cells can be returned to pluripotent state using “defined factors” (specific proteins that control which genes are active in a cell), a technique pioneered by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan.

However, the UNC study is the first to demonstrate that cells reprogrammed in this way can be coaxed to differentiate into insulin-secreting cells. Results of the study are published online in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

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(yes - I am retreading the title used over at Knitting Passion - different needles, different idea, same title - heh)

I know that one of the complaints most often heard about day to day glucose testing is that stick - do you wish there were some way to test levels WITHOUT doing a stick?

How about administering insulin without a daily stick? Does that appeal?

This article: Continuous Subcutaneous Infusion of Insulin just might have some of the answers you seek. The article stresses that the pump has not been approved for use at this time, but seems to say that it is likely in the near future.

Either it or something like it will come along - we can at least hope for that.

One thing that stuck out as I read this article was the hope that glucose testing might be done in the future through a wireless device. Now, just how cool is that? This, too, is still in the experimental stages.

When I think back to my younger years (I was born in 1950) and realize just how many inventions have come into being since I was born . . . well, I have every reason to hope that something like this article discusses will one day be possible.

HOPE!

Hello All!

We all understand that having diabetes is a scary thing but the thought that frequents most of our heads is “Will I have to take insulin?” Just because you have diabetes doesn’t guarantee that you will ever need to take insulin. Controlling your diabetes is the key to protecting yourself from taking these last resort medications.

Diet and Exercise regularly can help you in this fight to control your diabetes. Many of us have gotten lazy in our days, we want the weight loss and good health but don’t put fourth the effort it takes to achieve this. We are too busy, we will do it tomorrow, we lose interest in it. These are mere excuses and we need to find the desire to better ourselves no matter what!

Insulin is a hard medicine to get used to. Giving ourselves shots everyday is just a reminder we are a little different then everyone else. It must be handled with care. Ensure that we are careful when giving ourselves our doses. Below is a check list of things we should do when giving ourselves our medication.

1. Find a time that you can commit to each day: Giving yourself the injection at the same time each day will help the medicine be more affective. I will also help you remember to give it!

2. Find a quiet spot: finding a quiet spot free of distraction will help you give the injection without stress or pressure. It also ensures that there will be no distractions.

3. Keep a log: write down the name of the medication, the amount, the time, to ensure that you have given the proper dosage and to take to your doctor.

4. Keep the log near you: Write down which shot you have given and dosage amount, after each Shot! This will give you extra reference in case you forget in between shots!

Remember: We are all human and mistakes can happen! To insure that you do not overdose on insulin, check and re-check before each dose or shot!

For further information on insulin go to:

American Diabetes Association:
Information on insulin and overdoses!

www.diabetes.org

If you would like to read my story of Insulin Overdose go too:

http://www.diabeteshealth.com/read/2007/06/09/5248.html

Until next time!
Smiles,
Lisa