The medical condition known today as diabetes has been apparent for more than 3,500 years. But with no treatment other than reducing sugar and other carbohydrates in the diet and exercising, most diabetics lived only about a year.
It wouldn’t be until about 1982 that biotechnology would launch a laboratory means to construct an exact replica of human insulin from DNA, a remarkable discovery that today gives diabetics an insulin that has few to no side effects and an increased ability to live healthier and longer lives.
Prior to human insulin, diabetics relied on insulin extracted from the pancreases of cows and pigs, which have insulin that is a near — but not an exact — match to human insulin. This often resulted in side effects such as skin rashes. The extraction process from animals was not discovered until about 1920, and not used in humans until 1922.
Insulin is a hormone produced by beta cells in the pancreas. A diabetic’s pancreas slows or stops producing the substance, so injecting insulin becomes a type 1 diabetic’s only lifeline.
Diabetes, known to early researchers only as a digestive abnormality believed to be related somehow to the pancreas, was narrowed by researchers in the early 1900s to focus on a hormone (insulin) deficiency.
According to the Sir Frederick Banting Educational Committee and Baxter Corporation of New Tecumseth, Ontario, the discovery of insulin came in the summer of 1921. When working in J.J.R. MacLeod’s laboratory at the University of Toronto, Dr. Frederick Banting and Physiologist Charles Best made the world’s first pancreatic extract that had anti-diabetic characteristics. They tested it on diabetic dogs. It worked.
It was January 1922 when a diabetic teenager, Leonard Thompson would become the first person in history to receive an injection of insulin. He was in a Toronto hospital. His condition improved, news spread, and within a year, insulin by injection was widely available. Banting and MacLeod received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery.
The production of insulin proceeded. Eli Lilly and Company was the company that first produced and marketed human insulin.
As technology and medicine progressed, the way insulin was injected included a writing pen looking device. The insulin pump came on the scene as well. A pump is small (about the size of a pager or smaller), some models worn on a belt, under clothing and other models implanted under the skin. For the external models, an implanted needle just under the skin gives a diabetic’s body the amount of insulin it needs, based on the continuous monitoring of glucose levels in the blood.
Joining these innovations was a means for diabetics to prick their fingers, place a blood drop on a small strip, insert it into a meter and in a few minutes have their glucose reading appear on a small screen. The majority of diabetics today use this reliable method of testing.
Several years ago when glucose meters first came onto the scene, they were somewhat bulky, some almost as large as a hefty desktop calculator.
Then as the computer microchip made miniaturization possible, the meters became smaller. Today, some are so small that they are about the size of a credit card. Testing is essential
“The new meters have up to 250 memory locations that retain the test data, and it is downloadable onto a computer, so that the doctor can look at the results,” said Dennis Dolan of C & A Medical in Fairhope.
“People who test can maintain a lifestyle that is very close to normal,” he said.
He explained that it is imperative that patients do the testing and know what the results mean, and that they test often — multiple times a day.
“You can’t test once a month and know what your sugar is doing,” he said. “All of the technology in the world is not going to help you if you don’t watch what’s happening and take care of yourself,” he said.
“If it weren’t for this technology, we’d have a lot more people lying in bed and having amputations,” he said.
Amputations are sometimes necessary, especially in diabetics whose blood sugar is poorly controlled, because of nerve damage and/or poor circulation to the extremities such as feet and hands.
In efforts to help diabetics monitor their blood sugar and lifestyle changes, Jim Berry, himself a diabetic, offers “BG Tracker,” a free software program by download.
It is a Windows compatible program that enables diabetics to manually input their daily glucose test readings from their computer keyboards, then obtain averages, compose colorful graphs and detailed text reports.
Download test results
It also provides a means to track exercise and diet. The beauty of this software is that a diabetic’s test meter need not be computer capable or elaborate. The most basic will do since all inputs are done from the computer keyboard. This software is helpful in tight management of glucose levels and gives patients and their doctors a snapshot of diabetes control. It can be found at www.bgtracker.com.
Some meter manufacturers give the buyer the option of purchasing special cords and specific software tracking programs that can move their meter’s data directly into a computer, if their meter supports this function.
A new testing meter in the style of a wristwatch earned Food and Drug Administration approval in 1999 and became available to U.S. consumers in 2002. The meter, which is manufactured by Cygnus, Inc., Redwood City, Calif., tests blood sugar levels every 20 minutes by sending tiny low-level electrical impulses that pull glucose through the skin. It can be set to sound an alarm when glucose levels are too high or too low.
This technology represents a significant change in the current method of testing by drawing a tiny droplet of blood from a site, such as the fingertip and placing it on a test strip. But with the annual expense of operating this watch meter being almost twice that of conventional meters, it was not in widespread use by consumers in 2003.
In June 2002 at the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) 62nd Annual Scientific Sessions, scientists presented technologies that could offer methods of insulin delivery into the human body. The ADA says these methods are “a simple pill, a transdermal skin patch, a mouth spray or several versions of a pulmonary inhaled insulin.” Most of these products, which offer more hope for added convenience in lives of diabetics, are pending U.S. government approval or denial.
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