Diabetes specialist: 'We eat too much and do too little'

First, the good news: science is closing in on creating the artificial pancreas, a breakthrough treatment for those with diabetes, particularly type 1 diabetes.

Now, the very bad news: the number of Americans with diabetes, particularly type 2 diabetes, is soaring, with experts estimating that one in three Americans born in 2000 will have it in their lifetime if current trends continue.

Beverly Grimes sees the good and bad on a daily basis.

Grimes is the former director of the Diabetes Resource Center of Central Illinois at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center.

She is now a diabetes clinical specialist for Medtronic, a global company based in Minneapolis that specializes in medical technology.

"I think we eat too much and do too little," says Grimes of the nation's problem with diabetes, which she echoes other experts in calling "epidemic."

"America has gotten into that portion distortion. We don't even know how much we should be eating."

The Peoria area is no exception, she says, adding that our growing Hispanic population likely equates to more diabetics.

November is National Diabetes Awareness Month. It's a chronic, debilitating disease that affects 23.6 million Americans, with many millions more estimated to be undiagnosed.

Julie O'Brien, a certified nurse practitioner with OSF Medical Group Endocrinology, says the public needs awareness because of the type of diabetes that's increasingly being diagnosed.

"It's not that we're seeing more type 1 diabetes; we're seeing more type 2, which is directly linked to obesity," says O'Brien, noting that, meanwhile, the average age of patients continues to decrease.

"At one time, you would expect to see diabetes in someone in their 50s, 60s or 70s. Now it's common to see people diagnosed in their 40s, 30s and even their 20s. "The biggest issue is that there's such a strong link to heart disease with diabetes. Sixty percent of people with type 2 diabetes will die of heart disease," says O'Brien, who adds she sees a lot of people "who have a lot of denial. They aren't making the complete changes they need to make."

Such as eating right, exercising and losing weight. Those lifestyle changes, however, have much greater impact with type 2 diabetes. Those suffering from type 1 will always need injected or pumped insulin, which is why Grimes is so excited about her company's work towards creating an artificial pancreas.

"Continuous glucose monitoring - that's the big breakthrough," says Grimes of a special insulin pump with a sensor that monitors the patient's blood nearly 300 times a day. That technology was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration just a few years ago. "Every decade we get a new technology. In the '80s, we did urine (blood sugar) testing, then in the late '80s we did blood testing with the finger prick."

But no patient is going to prick themselves 300 times a day. Furthermore, this sensor also tells the patient which way their blood sugar level is headed.

"Eventually, what we're heading towards is getting the sensor to talk to the pump and run the pump," says Grimes, noting that is basically an artificial pancreas.

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation is spearheading a coalition to bring the artificial pancreas to market as soon as possible,

And William Tamborlane, chief of pediatric endocrinology at Yale School of Medicine who invented insulin-pump therapy in the late '70s, says the science is close to another breakthrough in diabetes management.

"We now have sensors that can say what the blood sugar's doing every minute," Tamorlane told MIT's Technology Review in August. "And we have insulin pumps that can change how much insulin it gives on a minute-to-minute basis. We have the technology right now to come pretty close to what might be considered the ultimate solution."

Jennifer Davis can be reached at (309) 686-3249 or jdavis@pjstar.com.