A study published in Diabetes Care in January of 2012 showed that patients with diabetes are more likely to develop cancer than people without diabetes and that adults with diabetes are more likely to die of cancer than their non-diabetic counterparts.  The association between diabetes and cancer was first noted over 100 years ago,...

Novo Nordisk’s widely popular GLP-1 analog Victoza made headlines at the beginning of the year when celebrity chef Paula Deen became a spokesperson for the drug.  This month Victoza is in the news again after  Novo Nordisk received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to update the product label for Victoza (liraglutide)....

Prediabetes is like the two minute warning just before the end of the first half in a football game.  You have those minutes of reflection and then perhaps the entire second half, but if you’re too far behind much of the second half might be a hopeless effort.  This isn’t an exact analogy, of course, but if you’ve...

My first encounter with insulin came when I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes.  Being pregnant was hard for me. Being diagnosed with diabetes was harder.   And learning how to cope with insulin therapy was the hardest part of all.  If you’ve never used insulin, or been around someone using it, you might think the worst...

Victoza (liraglutide) is by far Novo Nordisk’s fastest growing diabetes drug with a reported 185% growth in the first nine months of 2011. Introduced in Europe during the last quarter of 2009 and during the first quarter of 2010 in the US, Victoza quickly gained considerable market share with over 400 million dollars in sales in...

When we think of diabetic neuropathy, most of us think of our feet, not our stomachs.  There is, however, a debilitating form of neuropathy, known as gastroparesis, that affects the gastrointestinal tract (GI).  And while we don’t hear about this form of neuropathy all that often, it affects as many as 12% of people with diabetes. Gastroparesis...

I first heard about islet cell transplants to treat type 1 diabetes in 2000 when Dr. James Shapiro and his colleagues at the University of Alberta presented a breakthrough report describing what became known as the Edmonton protocol. They described seven consecutive participants in their research program who went without insulin injections...

Treato.com, a social health website, was initially conceived after high-tech veteran and entrepreneur, Gideon Mantel, experienced a frustrating, real life event.  Gideon’s daughter had torn her ACL playing basketball, and he went online to look for other patients’ experiences with this type of injury to learn how they coped....

I’m going to be upfront about it: the news that Novo Nordisk was seeking FDA approval for Degludec, their most advanced long-acting insulin, did not grab my attention.  Don’t get me wrong—the insulin is impressive in its claims: clinical trial results show that it lasts longer than 24 hours; can be administered at any time...

A drug recently approved by the FDA for the treatment of adults with certain congenital respiratory diseases, may delay the progression of type 1 diabetes.  Glassia®, the flagship product of the Israeli biopharmaceutical company, Kamada, was developed to treat Alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT) deficiency, a hereditary condition characterized...