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.
Category: Diabetes Management
From the moment of diagnosis, people with diabetes already live with secret fears of complications. Forcing people with diabetes to view others with complications, in my opinion, is cruel. It's also insulting to those, who despite their best efforts of diabetes management, may still have complications. Some people with very good blood sugar control can have a number of complications, while others with much worse control have minimal complications.
Focusing on eeking down that ever shifting number can be one of the most frustrating things a person living with diabetes has to do. But here is some good news: while there may not be a magic wand, there are some pretty simple, pretty cool fixes to help you on your way to lower your A1c.
Dr. Mariela Glandt, an endocrinologist and director of the Diabetes Medical Center in Tel Aviv uses a short course of intensive insulin therapy in order to "reset" beta cells and help them return to an earlier and more manageable stage of the disease.
Given that new tools to detect hypoglycemia, such as continuous glucose monitors, are now available, lead the authors to issue a target of 7.5% A1C for the entire pediatric population. It is important to note that despite the new lower recommendation, a recent study showed that only 32% of the Type 1 pediatric population met the previous ADA targets for their age group.
That’s why when I heard about Casey Steffen’s HbA1c teaching model, I was instantly intrigued. It is a scientific model of a HbA1c protein that is tangible so people with diabetes and health care professionals can see what protein glycation looks like. This description made me want to learn more, so I spoke with Steffen, who demonstrated a great deal of passion in launching this diabetes education crowdfunding initiative.
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.
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.
Doug Kanter is now building a company, Databetes, that aims to make this level of tracking and analysis more broadly accessible. In a Databetes world, we can all be data geeks with really excellent A1Cs.