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The Artificial Pancreas For Diabetics Is Nearly Here
the_newsbeagle writes: It's the tech that type 1 diabetics have long been waiting for: An implanted "closed-loop" system that monitors a person's blood-sugar level and adjusts injections from an insulin pump. Such a system would liberate diabetics from constant self-monitoring and give parents of diabetic children peace of mind. Thanks to improvements in glucose sensors and control algorithms, the first artificial pancreas systems are now in clinical trials.
Pretty amazing advance. Now I wish they'd do the same for the thyroid. My wife had hers removed due to cancer nine years ago, and has to manage her thyroid levels via synthetic thyroid hormone pills, which, while effective, are crude and require regular testing to make sure she's not hyperthyroidic or hyothyroidic.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Hopefully not an afterthought !
Even forgetting the security issue, going around with a pump and injection line connected all the time is a lot more of a pain in the ass than current methods. Also, it can't make judgements based on future activity - you might want less insulin than normal because you're about to embark an on 3-hour bike ride, which if you take your regular dose, will make you hypoglycemic, pass out, and wake up in an ambulance or the hospital (insulin efficiency increases with activity level, which is why you need less insulin when you're about to be active for any period of time).
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I'm surprised this hadn't been done earlier. Can't be that difficult to monitor glucose and release insulin accordingly?
... This would be the greatest moment in my life.
Since it does not produce it's own insulin it is not an artificial pancreas. It is an automatic insulin pump. It still has to be refilled with insulin periodically. It is an improvement but is not a replacement for a pancreas.
Just wondering, can it be modified to work with caffeine?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
a wild shitlord appears!
Someone didn't read the article.
According to the article, you can buy one now!
I assume the title was written by some one waiting for theirs to be delivered.
It's a self regulating insulin pump. That's a wonderful for type 1 diabetics, but the pancreas produces more than just insulin.
Glucagon is the primary axis hormone to insulin. A true artificial pancreas would monitor both hormones to optimize that relationship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KICIOYlZTr8
Unless the device makes insulin on demand, it ain't artificial pancreas. It releases insulin stored in a tank, mimicking the action of the pancreas, but the tank has to be refilled from external sources of insulin. But still it is a great advance. Why do they have to ruin a good article by needlessly hyping it in the title?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hopefully not an afterthought !
There are people out there - I don't know any of them - who would take a wooden baseball bat to any shithead's body who hacked one of his loved one's device. In a secluded place, of course. Then said person would burn that bat - and good luck proving it was him.
Of course, a thinking person would have the hacker convicted first, then sue in civil court for all of his assets before crippling him - said person is a decent person who doesn't murder people.
The above is just revenge fantasy and would never happen in real life.
Is there anything coming around for type 2 diabetics?
This is an engineering breakthrough. But we are still waiting on a medical breakthrough.
The real problem in diabetes is not limited to having the correct amount of insulin in the blood in real time. The problem that makes diabetes so hard to treat is that a person's cells develop insulin resistance, requiring larger and larger doses of insulin to break down sugars correctly.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
You must be new here.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Here's hoping that whoever brings "robopancreas" to market pays very, very serious attention to security. Security right now in medical devices is woefully poor and the medical device industry really needs to get their act together. There are evil folks out there who create malware that target insulin and morphine pumps...
One of the biggest problems about an automated system like this is when it goes wrong. As it stands, the Dexcom (sensor) isn't very reliable compared to how reliable it needs to be. This means that you'll need to continue monitoring your glucose by other methods, otherwise you'll run the risk of the sensor mis-reading and sending you into hyperglycemia, or worse yet a diabetic coma (if it reads high and gives you insulin when it shouldn't). If you're measuring your glucose (literally) multiple times a day to double check the Dexcom's work, then you're really not that much better off than you were before (since at that point you could have just dosed yourself with a non-automated pump while you were at it, based on that information).
This is to add to the critiques about the difficulties about the sensor not knowing about food/exercise that's about to happen.
It's all great work that needs to continue, but it's really just not "Nearly Here."
There is a lot of confusion and bad information on the subject of type 1 versus type 2 diabetes and how they relate.
I have had Late onset Auto-immune Diabetes of Adults, for close to 20 years, and have been involved in research programs studying it and can state a number of observations that might clear up a lot of the confusion:
Each case of type 1 or type 2 diabetes can be classified as an amount of insulin resistance relating to an increasing inability to control blood sugars and the body reflexively releasing ever increasing amounts of insulin to try to keep the blood sugar in check over time, leading to greater weight gain (in terms of body fat) and more insulin resistance in a run-away effect. This is your classic model of type 2 diabetes. Occasionally this is the triggering factor for an auto-immune component that starts to result in an auto-immune attack on the pancreatic beta cells, in particular an attack on by products of the activity of a gene in the beta cells referred to as TXNIP (google it to find out more.) This can lead to an inability to produce insulin and a condition that is similar to classic type 1 diabetes (the auto-immune kind)
In other people, early in childhood diabetes starts with the auto-immune component and the insulin resistance is less of a problem until later and usage of injected insulin comes into play and it is hard not to over-use the insulin to a point that some insulin resistance like the type 2 cases becomes apparent.
Several attempts are going on in research programs to stop the auto-immune attack on the pancreatic beta cells , both through adjuvant therapy that reduces the Killer - T-cells that attack the pancreatic beta cells and reducing the activation of the TXNIP gene in the beta cells, thereby causing the killer auto-immune T-cells not to have as much of a target to attack. In both cases there is some component of insulin resistance that needs to be dealt with to reduce the amount of insulin that it takes to keep blood sugars stable, and this is achieved through some approach using diet, exercise and drugs to achieve this where appropriate. Not all doctors are aware of this but increasingly they are.
In my view, the best approach is to determine the level of insulin resistance that is present and deal with it, and to introduce some level of reduction of the TXNIP gene expression and some level of reduction of the activity of auto-immunity due to the GAD killer t-cells.
Everyone is different and this is not a complete picture of what can cause insulin resistance leading to type 2 diabetes or all of the cases of type 1 style diabetes (there are a number of auto-immune causes that can happen) This model I have outlined here though can fit in my case, where someone has a family history of type 2 and ends up with LADA style type 1 diabetes, because usually it starts out with mild insulin resistance and an inability to lose body fat that gets worse and then devolves into an auto-immune diabetic condition.
In my case, I use an insulin pump along with diet and exercise and other drugs to reduce insulin resistance and the research I am involved in is using adjuvant therapy to reduce the auto-immunity. There are other research groups that are using drugs to reduce TXNIP activity (mice have been cured of type 1 diabetes and ended up with a greater functional beta cell mass than the controls) leading to beta cell regeneration. With an insulin pump or artificial pancreas, the challenges are :
1- having an accurate measure of how much insulin it takes to keep blood sugar stable for any amount of carbohydrate grams and how much blood sugar is reduced by how much insulin
2- A constant measure of how the relationship to insulin activity changes over the course of the day (because it can vary as much as 3 to 5 times) and how the changes change over the course of months or days as a net effect. The point is that insulin activity and insulin resistance is a constantly moving target.
3- Having an accurate measure of the amount o
Affordability will be an issue for most. My wife used to use an insulin pump, the pump cost around five grand. The consumables necessary to keep it operating month after month, year after year add up quickly. The initial cost of the device is nothing compared to the cost of maintaining it. After a few years it became impossibly expensive for us to continue to use. Back to syringes and vials for us. Pumps can work great, but if it takes the house and car payment to use them, quality of life can become an issue.