Katie Bacon

Katie Bacon is a writer and editor based in Boston. Her daughter, Bisi, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in August, 2012, when she was six. Katie worked as an editor at The Atlantic, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and other publications. Katie and her husband, Mark, have two children—Bisi and her older brother, Jamie.

The Road to a Type 1 Diabetes Cure: Encapsulation

When Doug Melton’s Harvard lab made the announcement last October that they had succeeded in turning human stem cells into functional beta cells, Melton, in a conversation with reporters, talked, too, about the other piece of the puzzle that might enable these cells to survive T1D’s autoimmune attack: encapsulation.

Diabetes Alert Dogs: What You Should Know

Cynthia Hatch, a mother in Brookfield, Wisconsin, is convinced that her family’s diabetes alert dog Sunny, a golden retriever/Irish setter mix, has saved her son Nathan’s life multiple times. Nathan has all the latest diabetes gear: a CGM tied into a pump that automatically shuts off when his glucose goes below a certain level. But he also has a rare combination of type 1 diabetes and Addison’s disease, another autoimmune condition where hormonal imbalances can cause severe and precipitous drops in blood sugar.

On the Road to a Type 1 Diabetes Cure: Melton Lab Creates Functioning Beta Cells

Using human embryonic stem cells as a base, the lab has pioneered a process that can reproduce human, insulin-producing beta cells on a large scale. As Melton said in a conference call with journalists, “What we’re reporting on is something that I think was obvious to many as a possible solution but just turned out to be difficult to achieve, and that is the creation of human beta cells that properly respond to sugar or glucose and secrete the right amount of insulin.”

How Our Daughter’s Type 1 Diabetes Diagnosis Changed her Life—And Ours

Even though Bisi can live a long, healthy life, I feel terribly sad for her, and for us. Sad that she will need tens (hundreds?) of thousands of blood tests and injections; sad that what she can eat and how she lives is so much more regimented and restricted than it was before; that she faces health consequences and worries that a six year old shouldn’t have to know about or think about. And I feel sad, even though she is a girl who takes an enormous amount of pleasure out of life, that she knows her life is shadowed by this.

The Future of Continuous Glucose Monitoring Technology

In a recent diaTribe interview with David Panzirer and Dana Ball, two of the main figures behind the Helmsley Charitable Trusts’s Type 1 Diabetes program, both men were asked what would be the most important advance in type 1 diabetes over the next five or ten years. Both men answered that improved continuous glucose monitoring technology has the potential to revolutionize the lives of people with type 1 diabetes.

The Three Year Diabetes Honeymoon – Part 2

When I called his doctors and told them he hadn’t been taking insulin for a couple of weeks, they said, give him a half unit of Lantus anyway, because it is very important for him psychologically. He is only five years old, the honeymoon will last probably only a couple of weeks, they told me, and for him it will be very hard emotionally to get back on insulin.

The Three Year Diabetes Honeymoon

My husband found a case study about a boy diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in Denmark who had gone on a gluten-free diet after diagnosis and, sixteen months in, had an A1C of below six percent, with no daily insulin therapy.

Diabetes Cure Research: Turning Duct Cells into Beta Cells

Bonner-Weir and other scientists have argued that either the beta cells in the pancreas continue to make copies of themselves, or that the pancreatic ducts, through a process called budding or neurogenesis, continue producing new cells.

How Long Can a Diabetes Honeymoon Last?

When our six-year-old daughter, Bisi, was hospitalized last summer after being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, part of the torrent of information we learned is that some patients have a diabetes honeymoon period, where the pancreas starts working again—though not perfectly—after diagnosis.

Feeding Nut Butter to a Child with Diabetes: Justin’s vs Artisana

When the two of us set out to review a bunch of nut butter samples from the companies Artisana and Justin’s, I realized that my love for nut butter—and for the idea of it as the perfect snack for Bisi—exceeds her willingness to eat it. In general, Artisana butters are pure and unadulterated: raw, organic, with no salt or sugar added. Justin’s are a little more corrupt—though much healthier than some of their competition.

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