It’s amazing what you can find on the internet nowadays. Just the other day, for example, I was musing further about healthcare and what it means for diabetics, when I came across a slideshow that perfectly exposed the elephant in the room of diabetes care and medical device development. Let me explain: the slideshow, likely seven...

As of Saturday, March 6, at 10:40 AM, I am one step closer to having my robot pancreas. I have, through a combination of landing the best endocrinologist in the Kaiser system and being a persistently squeaky wheel, gotten my Medtronic Minimed Continuous Glucose Monitoring System. I am phenomenally excited about this development, and not...

If you are taking Avandia or Actos and you have been reading about heart disease you may be concerned and you should be. As a class, these drugs increase your risk of heart disease and recent studies are confirming what we already suspected: Avandia is a bit worse on the heart than Actos. However, there is something you can do to protect...

I was reading the other day about the amount of Federal Stimulus grant money still remaining. Given the large amount of money allocated in the past year for grants, it is not entirely surprising that a large amount remains up for grabs for enterprising grant applicants. The most interesting segment to me is the money still available via...

The storm continues to rage. Congress has issued an angry report on Avandia in which neither GlaxoSmithKline nor the FDA was spared. The results of these clinical trials were not surprising. Numerous clinicians have been discussing cardiac events for all of the thiazolidinediones (TZD) as a drug class for at least a decade. Rosiglitizone...

Indian researchers have found that cow urine contains certain molecules that can fight diabetes, according to this report. Not to knock anyone’s good, hard research, but what popped into my mind when I read this was a scene with the witches in Macbeth: “Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder’s...

In the previous post we looked at some possible mechanisms which could contribute to Avandia’s issues with cardiac events. Here I would like to look more closely at the actual data so that we can come to our own conclusions about Avandia. The most recent is the re-analysis of the results of the RECORD (Rosiglitazone Evaluated for Cardiac...

I’ll admit it: I have a Splenda habit. I’ve tried Stevia, I’ve experimented with agave, but at the end of the day I always find myself back with my little yellow packets. Sucralose = my diabetic addiction. When Splenda first came out, I remember raving about it to my roommate Max, a very smart guy who tended to know...

The New York Times (NYT) has just reported that the popular diabetes drug, Avandia, causes heart attacks. The information came from an internal FDA study in which the fate of Avandia has been argued for months. Is this a media scare or is this real? First of all, one of the major complications of diabetes is heart disease. The tissues...

I just had a feature published in Popular Science that I think might be of interest to others with Type 1. As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, right after being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes 9 years ago, I enrolled in a trial for a new drug called an anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody (best known as teplizumab and being studied...