New Diabetes Research Takes A Page From The Past With A Drug From The 1950s | Miami Herald

New diabetes research takes a page from the past with a drug from the 1950s | Miami Herald

Prior to Daniel Dyner having open-heart surgery four years ago, he appeared to be in great health.
He had just moved to Key Biscayne from Venezuela, where he spent his time sailing around the world on solo trips to places like Trinidad, the Mediterranean and the coast of Africa. He swam nearly a mile every day and kept a strict diet.
The 69-year-old Dyner was on the first lap of his daily swim in May 2013 when he “suddenly felt funny.”
He immediately went to see Dr. Gervasio Lamas, his cardiologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach.
Never miss a local story.
Sign up today for a free 30 day free trial of unlimited digital access.
SUBSCRIBE NOW
“I remember this so distinctly,” said Dyner, now 73. “The guy said ‘stop’ and he ran over with two doctors. They said I had 24 hours to live.”
Dyner
Jose A. Iglesias [email protected]
The next morning, Dyner underwent open-heart surgery. After that, his sugar levels went “completely crazy.”
Now, Dyner is part of Lamas’ clinical trial at Mount Sinai, where Type 2 diabetics with a history of cardiac arrest might find a solution to their complications. The key? A drug developed in the 1950s.
To treat diabetes in new ways, South Florida physicians and researchers like Lamas and Dr. Camillo Ricordi, director of the Diabetes Research Institute at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, are looking to the past for answers.
Both are testing alternative techniques in hopes of bringing unconventional diabetes treatments into the mainstream.
In Type 1 diabetes, which affects about 5 percen Continue reading

Rate this article

Total 1 ratings

New Diabetes treatment available in Palm Beach Gardens

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. —
A new diabetes treatment is being offered at the Nicklaus Children’s Palm Beach Gardens Outpatient Center.
“With the new pump there’s a lot of consistency and peace of mind and it just helps me live normally,” said Colton Smith, a 16-year-old high school football player who has Type 1 diabetes and started treatment a few months ago.
The Medtronic MiniMed 670G system works by automatically measuring blood sugar, predicting when a rise or fall is going to occur, and continuously delivering precise doses of insulin. Eight patients at the center in Palm Beach Gardens are currently using it but medical staff said they’d like to add more.
“When our kids were growing up we had to go to Orlando or Miami and now they can do things here,” said legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus. He and his wife Barbara said they are just happy to have the means to be able to help. Continue reading

Diabetes educator role boundaries in Australia: a documentary analysis

Abstract
Background
Diabetes educators provide self-management education for people living with diabetes to promote optimal health and wellbeing. Their national association is the Australian Diabetes Educators Association (ADEA), established in 1981. In Australia the diabetes educator workforce is a diverse, interdisciplinary entity, with nurses, podiatrists, dietitians and several other health professional groups recognised by ADEA as providers of diabetes education. Historically nurses have filled the diabetes educator role and anecdotally, nurses are perceived to have wider scope of practice when undertaking the diabetes educator role than the other professions eligible to practise diabetes education. The nature of the interprofessional role boundaries and differing scopes of practice of diabetes educators of various primary disciplines are poorly understood. Informed by a documentary analysis, this historical review explores the interprofessional evolution of the diabetes educator workforce in Australia and describes the major drivers shaping the role boundaries of diabetes educators from 1981 until 2017.
This documentary analysis was undertaken in the form of a literature review. STARLITE framework guided the searches for grey and peer reviewed literature. A timeline featuring the key events and changes in the diabetes educator workforce was developed. The timeline was analysed and emerging themes were identified as the major drivers of change within this faction of the health workforce.
This historical review illustrates that there have been drivers at the macro, meso Continue reading

Taking blood pressure drugs at night wards off diabetes, study finds

(Mike Derer / Associated Press)
Sometimes, disease-prevention really is this simple: Adults with high blood pressure who take all of their hypertension medications before they go to bed, rather than in the morning, are less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes, new research has found.
The new findings are in line with other insights gleaned by the same investigators: that hypertension patients who are most at risk of developing diabetes -- and cardiovascular disease -- are those whose blood pressure fails to show a substantial dip during sleep.
It stood to reason, then, that a medication regimen that more tightly controls a hypertensive's blood pressure while he or she sleeps might help to at least forestall the development of Type 2 diabetes.
In a large clinical trial conducted in Spain and published Wednesday in the journal Diabetologia, that hypothesis turned out to be true. And effecting such tight nighttime blood-pressure control turned out to be as simple as having subjects take their hypertension drugs -- whether ACE inhibitors, angiotensin-receptor blockers or beta blockers -- before they turned in for the night.
A drop in blood pressure is normal while sleeping. But not all people see such a dip while they sleep, and some see more shallow dips.
A second trial, also published in Diabetologia on Wednesday and conducted by the same group of Spanish researchers, found that subjects whose blood pressure did not dip, and those whose readings dipped more briefly or shallowly, were more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than those whose sleep-time blood pressure saw a deep an Continue reading

Is “Keto” the Key to Reversing Diabetes?

SEATTLE -- A wave of recent studies show that in many cases, type 2 diabetes is partly or wholly reversible with high fat, very low carb ketogenic diets.
Speakers at the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute 5th annual Thought Leaders Consortium urged the clinical community to radically re-think the received wisdom about this common disorder, and start applying diet and lifestyle programs that actually address the root causes of the condition.
Fresh data from an ongoing study of 232 overweight or obese women and men with type 2 diabetes (average age 54 years, average BMI of 41), provide evidence that after 10 weeks on a carefully-formulated low-carb ketogenic diet, 36% were able to stop insulin therapy completely, while an additional 51% were able to significantly lower their doses.
Mean hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) measures dropped from 7.5% to 6.5%, with 56% of the participants reaching A1c levels below the diagnostic threshold for diabetes. This was accompanied by clinically significant weight loss in 71% of cases (McKenzie A, et al. JMIR Diabetes. 2017 2 (1): e5).
Though many clinicians and researchers have long predicted the possibility, this is the first large-scale study to show that major biomarkers of type 2 diabetes can be consistently shifted in the right direction via dietary interventions.
“We are very pleased with what we are seeing,” said Stephen Phinney, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer and co-founder of Virta Health, a San Francisco based clinic specializing in lifestyle-based treatment of diabetes and related metabolic diseases. “And all of this is based Continue reading