The strange thing about writing about diabetes is that you put yourself at risk of really letting it take over your life. Things can get sort of meta — you’re living with diabetes, but then you’re also writing about living with it. (And in many cases you’re writing about how you don’t think it should take over your life.) Well, I just discovered a third level — a meta-meta-level, if you will: dreaming about diabetes. Yup. Last night I woke up in the middle of the night from a very vivid dream in...

A drug commonly used to treat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and rheumatoid arthritis now also shows some promise in helping patients newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The drug, rituximab (Rituxan) helped patients continue to produce some of their own insulin, although the disease had already begun to destroy the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, reports a study in the Nov. 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.   In the trial, 87 patients between the ages of 8 and 40 who had newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes...