Home » Sensors and insulin pumps. And new “ways” of pancreatic transplantation – breaking latest news

Sensors and insulin pumps. And new “ways” of pancreatic transplantation – breaking latest news

by admin
from Elena Meli

Unprecedented ability to control blood glucose, which improves disease management by reducing the risk of complications and improving quality of life

Not only has insulin drastically changed the lives of people with diabetes in recent decades, but also the technology around it. Just twenty-five, thirty years ago our life was conditioned by a bottle, syringe and clock: we had to have the same injection every day at the same time and eat the same foods, living the same way, says Paolo Di Bartolo in his double role as person with diabetes and president of the Association of Diabetologists. Then came the hormones for all needs, of course, but also the way of administering them changed: with the first “pen”, in 1985, there was a real revolution, a liberation: it was no longer necessary to go home for the injection because the insulin had to stay in the fridge, it was enough to have two pens in your pocket. We began to be masters of our days. The same state per blood glucose measurement: from the strips to the sensors which can be applied to the skin or even under the skin, which last up to several weeks and monitor blood glucose practically continuously, recording the values ​​every five minutes.

New quality of life

The result is an unprecedented ability to control blood glucose, which improves disease management by reducing the risk of complications but without changing the quality of life of the patients, indeed improving it. If you add to this the possibility of using insulin pumps, perhaps connected to the sensors and with algorithms capable of deciding the insulin dose in response to the readings without or almost without the intervention of the patient in what is increasingly approaching a real artificial pancreas, we realize that today slowly diabetes is becoming a pathology that you hardly notice.

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Life expectations

The days of a person with diabetes are comparable to those of those who do not have blood sugar problems, the permitted activities have no boundaries (there are professional athletes with diabetes in all disciplines and there are no athletic feats of any kind) and above all life expectancy today is comparable to that of the general populationand whereas just a century ago, before the arrival of insulin, a diagnosis of diabetes meant death within one, two years or so. And in the future there will be even more definitive solutions, to do without insulin in any form: in fact, the first experimental protocol for the transplantation of pancreatic islets in capsules, which does not require immunosuppressive therapy, has just been approved.

Transplant option

Pancreas transplantation and pancreatic islet transplantation are already today two therapeutic options that allow to reach glycemic compensation without insulin, but they are not a definitive cure because they require immunosuppressive therapy: for this reason they are offered only to selected cases, such as those unresponsive to insulin therapy or already on immunosuppressive therapy for another disease or transplant. In Italy there are a few dozen patients every year, explains Federico Bertuzzi of AMD, a researcher at the Niguarda hospital in Milan. A protocol has now been approved for the transplantation of pancreatic islets inserted in “capsules” that protect them from attack by the immune system and prevent rejection: the trial, in which the University of Perugia and the Diabetes Research Institute of Miami collaborate, has already enrolled the first eight cases. Hope to have one more option for more difficult cases; for everyone else insulin will remain the lifesaver, but living with it will be less and less complicated.

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August 8, 2021 (change August 8, 2021 | 16:25)

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