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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.
My sister would disagree with your assessment, and she's been a diabetic since she was 4 years old(31 years of shots now). If my great aunt was still alive, she'd be jumping for it too since she'd been a diabetic for ~70 odd years. There are plenty of methods to avoid hypoglycemia from working out, this in itself is a huge step in the current pump a needle in you every 2/4/6/8 hours that exists now.
The biggest problem is with kids and getting them to do monitoring, tests, etc., since many of them don't understand not doing something like that will kill you. It's a concept that a 4 year old can't get, no matter how simple you explain it to them.
Om, nomnomnom...
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
My understanding is that there isn't a direct relation between what's being read from the sensor and what is actually in the blood. The glucose sensor just senses the amount of glucose in the blood. So if it gives a reading of x, and then gives a dose of y units of insulin to counteract, it doesn't know that you're going to start running in 1 minute which will decrease the glucose levels further than it expected to based on the amount of insulin delivered. So, now you're going to be low on glucose. The only way to do that is to add glucose to the blood. Assuming this system does this, it can bring the blood sugar back up. However, it also doesn't know about the chocolate bar you just ingested which will again add glucose to your system in the near future.
For a system like this to work, it has to make constant tiny adjustments to your insulin and glucose levels to ensure that it always remains in a certain safe zone. Scott Hanselman did a pretty good write-up a few years back. It's really kind of depressing when you look into the current state of affairs. The diabetes industry seems to be more concerned with making money than actually solving people's problems.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
How regular is regular though? Taking a test once every 3 months and adjusting your medication up or down a fraction of a milligram is an inconvenience. But it's a lot better then having to test 4-8 times a day and making significant changes to the dosage level due to what was ate, activities planned, illness, and how the body reacts to all of that. As a diabetic myself, I'd trade in an instant having to deal with hyper/hypo-thyroidism over diabetes any day.
Well, actually, there are two kinds of diabetes. In one type (adult-onset diabetes or Type 2 diabetes) the body becomes less and less responsive to insulin. This is the kind associated with obesity, and the pump won't help this much. The other type (juvenile diabetes or Type 1 diabetes) is caused by the body stopping production of insulin, generally because the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas die off. The body remains completely responsive to insulin; the problem is that there isn't any any more. This will be a godsend for people with Type I.
No, Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, not a symptom of a lifestyle problem. It's not caused by lifestyle either.