Cost Of Insulin Just One Hurdle For Seniors With Diabetes

Cost of insulin just one hurdle for seniors with diabetes

Dolores Suvak retired from her job as a high school English teacher in the Woodland Hills School District in 2006 with a generous retirement package that included an additional 10 years of health coverage under her school employees’ plan.
Then came year 11.
Ms. Suvak, 68, is diabetic, one of an estimated 11.2 million seniors — 25.9 percent of Americans 65 or older, according to the American Diabetes Association — who have the condition that can result in serious infections as well as nerve, kidney and eye damage, and life-threatening heart disease.
For her, diabetes has meant daily testing, multiple injections and regular monitoring of her blood sugar.
It also has meant the expense of test strips, lancets, needles and life-sustaining insulin, all of which have dug deep into the fixed retirement income that she and her husband Ronald live on. The switch to Medicare came with a financial trapdoor — Medicare Part D’s prescription drug “doughnut hole” coverage gap — that she says doubled her diabetes-related costs that first year.
“It knocked the socks off of me. It just devastated me,” the Swissvale resident said last week.
Patients and providers alike have noted the rising cost of insulin, which the American Diabetes Association says nearly tripled in price between 2002 and 2013.
But that is only one of the hurdles that seniors with diabetes face. There’s also the emergence of high-deductible insurance plans, shifting more of the cost of care to patients, plus formularies that may change which insulin brands are covered at a lower cost.
“This isn’t j Continue reading

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Alzheimer’s: Is It Diabetes of the Brain?

Could what we eat be killing our brains? Or, to put it another way, could Alzheimer’s really be Type 3 diabetes?
The theory is that the factors in our diet and the environment that’s causing the Type 2 diabetes epidemic is also playing a role in the increasing rate of Alzheimer’s — resulting in a third form of diabetes, Type 3 brain diabetes.
It’s an intriguing — some might say controversial — theory. In any case, it’s certainly one more reason to put down that soda and cut back on the bacon cheeseburgers.
What exactly is diabetes? It’s a disorder in which the body can’t use insulin properly to take up sugar in the blood for energy. The result is a dangerous build-up of sugar, which can damage other organs.
Right now there are two recognized types of diabetes — Type 1, which you’re born with, and Type 2, which develops later, mostly because of bad eating habits, particularly junk food and sugary beverages, and obesity. No surprise — the vast majority of diabetes in this country is Type 2.
The thinking behind Type 3 goes like this: The brain, like the rest of the body, needs insulin to help provide its cells with energy. But with Alzheimer’s, the insulin apparently is blocked from helping the brain. The result is that brain cells literally starve to death.
Or, as Suzanne De La Monte, M.D., a neuropathologist at Brown University, first explained in 2005 after examining Alzheimer’s patients’ brains, “Insulin disappears early and dramatically in Alzheimer’s disease. In the most advanced stage of Alzheimer’s, insulin receptors were nearly 80 Continue reading

Could a common blood pressure drug completely reverse diabetes?

Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the US, raising risks for heart attack, blindness, kidney disease and limb amputation. But researchers who have shown that a common blood pressure drug totally reverses diabetes in mice are about to begin a new clinical trial to see if it can do the same for humans.
If the trial is successful, it could herald the first "cure" for an incurable disease that affects 12.3% of Americans over the age of 20 and costs the nation $245 billion each year.
The key to the groundbreaking approach that has been proven effective in mice are beta cells, which the researchers explain are "critical" in type 1 and type 2 diabetes. These cells are progressively lost in the wake of the disease due to programmed cell death, though the precise triggers for the deaths were previously unknown.
The researchers, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and led by Dr. Anath Shalev, have been working on this research for over a decade in UAB's Comprehensive Diabetes Center.
They explain that their previous research has shown that high blood sugar causes an overproduction of a protein called TXNIP - which is increased within beta cells in response to diabetes. Too much TXNIP in pancreatic beta cells leads to their deaths, stopping the body's efforts to produce insulin and further promoting diabetes.
However, in animal models, the team has found that verapamil - used to treat high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat and migraine headaches - lowers TXNIP levels in beta cells.
In fact, in mice with established diabetes and blood sugars over 300 mg/ Continue reading

Stop Diabetes® From Knocking You Off Your Feet

Did you know that April is Limb Loss Awareness Month?
People with diabetes can develop many different foot problems, and even seemingly simple ones can lead to serious complications. The reason? Many people with diabetes have artery disease, which reduces blood flow to the feet. Many also have nerve disease, called neuropathy, which reduces sensation, making it harder to tell when something’s wrong.
Together, these problems make it easy to get ulcers and infections that may lead to amputation. In fact, more than 60 percent of nontraumatic lower-limb amputations occur in people with diabetes.
The good news is that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), amputations have declined significantly among U.S. adults with diabetes in recent years. This is largely due to better foot care and overall diabetes management—proving that taking care of yourself and your feet can go a long way.
Most people can prevent serious foot troubles by following some simple steps. So here are the do’s and don’ts of foot care:
Keep your blood glucose in your target range. That’s the best way to prevent most diabetes complications.
Have your health care provider perform a complete foot exam at least once a year.
Check your bare feet daily. Look for red spots, cuts, swelling and blisters. If you cannot see the bottoms of your feet, use a mirror or ask someone for help.
Wash your feet every day. Dry them carefully, especially between the toes. Using a pumice stone (on wet skin) every day will help keep calluses under control.
Keep your skin soft and smooth by rubbin Continue reading

An unlikely tool to combat diabetes: chocolate, say researchers

But here’s the thing: BYU researchers have discovered certain compounds found in cocoa can actually help your body release more insulin and respond to increased blood glucose better. Insulin is the hormone that manages glucose, the blood sugar that reaches unhealthy levels in diabetes.
Of course, there’s a catch.
“You probably have to eat a lot of cocoa, and you probably don’t want it to have a lot of sugar in it,” said study author Jeffery Tessem, assistant professor of nutrition, dietetics and food science at BYU. “It’s the compound in cocoa you’re after.”
When a person has diabetes, their body either doesn’t produce enough insulin or doesn’t process blood sugar properly. At the root of that is the failure of beta cells, whose job it is to produce insulin. The new study, published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, finds beta cells work better and remain stronger with an increased presence of epicatechin monomers, compounds found naturally in cocoa.
To discover this, collaborators at Virginia Tech first fed the cocoa compound to animals on a high-fat diet. They found that by adding it to the high-fat diet, the compound would decrease the level of obesity in the animals and would increase their ability to deal with increased blood glucose levels.
The BYU team, comprised of graduate and undergraduate students in Tessem's lab and the labs of Ben Bikman and Jason Hansen (BYU professors of physiology and developmental biology), then dove in and dissected what was happening on the cellular level — specifically, the beta cell level. That’s when Continue reading