To start with I just had a general kind of
cold feeling
very weak and very tired
and eventually, I actually got
rushed to hospital because I ended up in a coma.
Not too distant past, if you were a child diagnosed with diabetes
it was basically a death sentence.
Originally they did not know that diabetes was associated with the pancreas.
They did a pancreatectomy dogs which means taking out the pancreas and they were really suprised to
find these dogs got diabetes
They then managed to
take the pancreases of dogs and form some very crude extract which was basically
mashed up pancreas, inject into the
other diabetic dogs and they realised that this really helped in getting the blood glucose
down.
You always have to inject Insulin with every meal you have, so at breakfast, lunch and
dinner time
you have to
inject insulin
and then you also have to take another injection of insulin
which is released slowly through out the day.
If you accidentally inject a little bit too much insulin
or if you have been doing more sports
than usual
your blood glucose levels can actually dropped to dangerously low level
and this can make you go into a coma.
I have a twin sister and
I remember her telling me recently she was really worried and used to
check in the night
that I had not passed
out because I was hypo
so I think they use to
I think the biggest worry for them was that you go hypoglycemic and then
you can go into hypoglycemic coma
Another way forward that I'm particularly interested in is transplantation.
The idea behind this is that you would take cells that produce insulin and
transplant them to the diabetes patients so that they would not have to inject insulin.
I think the biggest impact it has on your life, is that it is a constant
worrying in a sense in that you have to
monitor your glucose levels all the time
and I think worrying about being
hypoglycemic
is probabaly one of the biggest problems
associated with diabetes. Transplantation is something that is very difficult to do
without having a whole body. Transplantation of the islet of langerhans
which are these bundles of cells that contain and introduce the insulin
producing cells
when you transplant them
you need to get a new blood supply, you need to get a new nerve supply
so it's really difficult
to transplant without using an animal unfortunately
Human islet transplantation has been done and
this was a consequence of people finding out that islet transplantation in rodents
worked
The trouble with human islet transplantation is
it is only confined to a very small number of patients
and this is because of the risks involved
the patients need to go on immuno suppresion
and for most patients it is safer just to stay on insulin.
but what are research wants to do is make it more widely available, to hide
islets from the immune system so that
we would not have to give the patients immunosuppressive drugs which have
a lot of bad side effects and we are doing that by encapsulating the islets so that the
immune system does not recognize them.
The other aspect that I'm looking at is, I'm trying to make the islets
the islet transplantation more efficient so that we could transplant fewer islets
to 1 patient because at the moment
usually 2 pancreases are needed to cure 1 patient and obviously this
leads to a huge
lack of donor issue.
In an ideal world for anyone with diabetes I think the
treatment would be
to make sure that you no longer have to spend a lot of time
and to think about testing your blood glucuse concentrations
I think just taking away
the fact that you have to think about it
a lot of time
would be the best thing