Race car driver Charlie Kimball. Photo by Mike Levitt. Courtesy of LAT-USA. All rights reserved.

An avid racer since age 9, Kimball was abruptly forced to abandon an emerging professional career in June 2007, when he was diagnosed with diabetes during a routine physician’s visit. Determined to get back behind the wheel, Kimball worked with his doctor and team to map a diabetes treatment strategy that includes competing at speeds exceeding 200 mph.

Now in his second season with Novo Nordisk Chip Ganassi Racing, we asked Kimball which was his top challenge: driving an open wheel race car, or living with diabetes?

“Driving an IndyCar! We have great tools for diabetes. Racing is always changing with new drivers and equipment. But I’m fortunate to have racing as a goal. It makes me face the challenge of diabetes,” says the young American driver.

Modern devices like continuous glucose monitors and meters are vital to diabetes control but sometimes you just have to get creative, says Kimball.

Charlie Kimball and Novo Nordisk Chip Ganassi Racing scored a career-best second place finish at the IndyCar Honda Indy Toronto 2012. Courtesy of LAT USA. All rights reserved.

Congratulations, Charlie Kimball! The world’s fastest race cars snaked through Toronto streets lined with speed-loving fans on July 8, 2012, where Charlie Kimball captured his first podium-finish!

Follow Kimball on Twitter at @RaceWithInsulin.

Click here for the 2012 IZOD IndyCar Racing Schedule.

New Treatment for Kids with Diabetes

I’m a better athlete because of diabetes rather than despite it, says IndyCar driver Charlie Kimball. Photo by Mike Levitt. Courtesy of LAT-USA. All rights reserved.

In June, diabetes care company Novo Nordisk announced FDA approval of Levemir® (a man-made insulin) for children ages two to five with type 1 diabetes. The prescription is now available for type 1 diabetes patients ages two through adulthood and adult patients with type 2 diabetes.

About Diabetes
In the United States, 25.8 million people have diabetes, a condition in which the body does not produce enough or properly use insulin, the hormone needed to convert sugar, starches, and other food into energy needed for daily life.

Charlie Kimball Is Racing With Insulin The Saturday Evening Post

Researchers trained 24 rats to run a maze and then assigned them to a diet enriched with or without the omega-3 DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and with or without a sugar solution.  Six weeks later, rats ran the maze again from memory. The results: omega-3s boosted memory and sugar water hampered it.

“Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think,” said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a professor of integrative biology and physiology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. “Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain’s ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage.”

According to Dr. Gomez-Pinilla, eating too much fructose (a sugar found in cane sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and fruit) could block insulin’s ability to regulate how cells use and store sugar for the energy required for processing thoughts and emotions.

“Insulin is important in the body for controlling blood sugar, but it may play a different role in the brain, where insulin appears to disturb memory and learning,” he said. “Our study shows that a high-fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body. This is something new.”

The UCLA study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Gomez-Pinilla’s lab will next examine the role of diet in recovery from brain trauma.

Click here for additional research updates from the UCLA Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology.

Sugar Sours Memory, Fish Oil Enhances The Saturday Evening Post

In the study, six healthy but overweight men ate a dinner of coconut chicken, white rice, cheese bread, and a dessert biscuit. Then, after at least a week, they dined on chicken curry, Italian herb bread, and a cinnamon biscuit. Blood tests before and after the meals found the spicier meal reduced insulin and triglyceride levels—but not glucose. Researchers believe that phenol compounds in the spices accounted for the metabolic benefits.

Sheila West, PhD, of Penn State University, and colleagues reported their findings online in the Journal of Nutrition.

Nutrition News: Spice It Up for Health The Saturday Evening Post

Part 2: Giving Back

Country singer George Canyon speaks about the recognition he’s most proud of—a humanitarian award for his work to support finding a cure for type 1 diabetes. Canyon offers inspirational talks and performances for children living with type 1 and their families in Canada and the U.S.

Post: You have talked to thousands of type 1 diabetic kids. What do you want them to know, and how do you encourage them?

Canyon: My basic message to kids is: Control your diabetes, and live your dreams. One way that I connect with the kids is by comparing our blood sugar numbers—it’s just something they like to do. But children need to understand that they can and must control their diabetes. When they lend a hand in testing their blood sugar and taking their insulin, in eating right and exercising regularly, they develop a certain pride in taking care of themselves. Over time, that sense of responsibility lays the groundwork for controlling diabetes and achieving success throughout life.

At age 14, I was told I could never fly an airplane or be an Air Force captain. But I never gave up on my dreams. Today, I have been a pilot for 3 ½ years. I fly my own plane, and I’m an honorary captain in the Air Force. I let the kids know that I am living proof that type 1 diabetics can achieve their dreams.

Post: What is your message for parents of kids with type 1?

Canyon: I stress the psychological side of the disease. Looking back on my teen years, I think 80 percent of the control of my diabetes was in my head. Today I frequently hear parents say their daughter won’t take her insulin or their son says he forgets to take it. Once I confronted one of those children and said: You aren’t forgetting to take your insulin, are you. And she blurted: “No, I’m not. But people keep telling me that I can’t do things that I want to. So why take shots?”

I was able to change her mindset by encouraging her to prove those people wrong. She needs to show them that she is healthy and able to achieve her goals. That bit of motivation clicked a psychological drive back into action. Now she takes care of herself physiologically because the brain is driving her to take care of her own diabetes.

Post: Having strong role models is very important to young people.  Did you have one?

Canyon: I had no one. Don’t get me wrong—I had wonderful people around me, my parents, nurses, and my doctor, but I was not aware of any role model in the music business, in Hollywood, or the sports world who was saying, “Hey I’m a type 1 diabetic and I’m living my dream.” So I always said to myself that if I ever became successful, in whatever career, I was going to be a role model to kids in some way.

Today, it’s clear to me that my work with the kids fills me up more than it does them. But I can tell from their conversations that they really do pay attention to celebrities and having role models is important to them.

Post: What do people without diabetes need to know about the condition?

Canyon: Society as a whole needs to step back and take time to learn just how well people can live diabetes. Today’s kids with type 1 diabetic juvenile-onset are well educated and in tune with their body and their disease. Many are also in incredibly great physical condition, especially with new advances in treatment such as insulin pump therapy.

Juvenile type 1 diabetes affects millions of people.  Everybody should know about the steps that have been made by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and others in controlling and understanding of this disease. It’s not caused by eating poorly or not getting enough exercise. And it’s not the end of one’s dreams.

Post: How can readers tap into the latest information and research about type 1 diabetes?

Canyon: There are some fantastic websites for parents and kids with diabetes that are also great tools for people who don’t have the disease but want to learn about it. Here are three:

Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International is one of the best resources out there.

The Animas website. This is the insulin pump that I have and the only one that I know. People will be truly amazed at how the control of diabetes has changed.

Children With Diabetes is doing unbelievable things to help kids with type 1 diabetes physiologically as well as psychologically and to support their families and other adults as well. The CWD organization sponsors large events; I was at one that 2500 kids with diabetes attended. The organizers had them break into age groups, and suddenly one child was with 50 or 100 or 200 other type diabetics of the same age. There was an instant sense of belonging! They talked about their diabetes and about things they might not mention to their healthcare professionals or their parents. Peer support is so important.  Kids will listen to a buddy who says, “Oh you should do this instead of that,” before they’ll listen to their parents or other adults.

Post: Is there anything you would like to add?

Canyon: I’m real excited to get out there with people in mainstream society who might not be touched by type 1 diabetes and speak openly about my disease.

I can’t stress enough that JDRF and other diabetes researchers are not just trying to find a cure for the disease, they are also working to find new and better ways to treat it. It’s so important that we all try to help as much as we can.

Control Your Diabetes and Live Your Dreams, Part 2 The Saturday Evening Post

Nutrition experts at Oregon State University Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University have essentially “cured” laboratory mice of mild, diet-induced diabetes by boosting production of an enzyme called elongase-5. Liver function and blood sugar levels returned to normal after genetic manipulation, according to study findings published in the Journal of Lipid Research.

In the future, scientists hope to find a drug that will raise elongase-5 levels to help treat people with the form of diabetes related to lifestyle.

Research teams led by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Columbia University in New York City report in the July 23 issue of Cell that bones may control how the rest of the body responds to insulin.

Data from the two studies conducted in mice indicate that bone cells called osteoblasts control release of a hormone that accelerates glucose metabolism elsewhere in the body. The discovery might pave the way to new diabetes drugs that target the key pathway, say researchers.

Research Front: Diabetes Drugs The Saturday Evening Post

After years of research, insulin pills that could make it easier for millions of patients worldwide to manage diabetes are finally moving ahead in clinical trials and a step closer to the medicine cabinet. Investigators are utilizing special coatings for insulin pills that prevent stomach acid from destroying them and additives that make it easier for the intestine to absorb large molecules like insulin. After years of setbacks, several insulin pills are now in various stages of clinical trials, and proof of concept may allow them to move into late-stage and more rigorous clinical testing. Only time will tell, however, whether these much-anticipated pills will make it to the market.

Source: American Chemical Society

Diabetes News The Saturday Evening Post

We’re happy to say that the tradition continues. In the September 2010 issue, Post writer Elizabeth Svoboda profiles eight remarkable discoveries that offer hope for practical solutions to debilitating medical problems such as diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and more.

Here’s a sneak peak at the upcoming issue, as well as a sampling of diabetes discoveries from the Post archives.

A Look Ahead

Artificial Pancreas (w/image and video of automated insulin delivery system)

When Tyler Wolf was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a teenager, his diabetes management routine abruptly became a looming part of his life. Like many of the nearly 24 million diabetes sufferers in the United States, Wolf had to test his blood sugar and give himself insulin injections every day. The grueling routine grated on him. He sometimes rebelled, refusing to check his blood sugar and ending up woozy and delusional as a result.

Dr. Stuart Weinzimer, an endocrinologist at Yale University, is working to ensure that someday patients like Wolf won’t have to wrangle with needles and home test strips anymore. In conjunction with Minneapolis-based Medtronic, Dr. Weinzimer is developing an “artificial pancreas” for diabetics. This automated insulin delivery system, about the size of a small paperback book, includes a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) that channels real-time blood sugar readings to an insulin pump, which then directs the pump to dispense the proper amount of insulin to keep blood sugar levels in equilibrium.

Wolf was among the first patients to evaluate the device, and he was immediately impressed at how it took over the work of managing his disease for him. “The idea of never having to worry about monitoring—that’s close to a cure,” Wolf says. Dr. Weinzimer hopes that it will be commercially available within the next decade.

Here’s a video of the experimental automated insulin deliver system from Medtronic.

A Look Back

Some 70 years before Dr. Weinzimer’s work on an artificial pancreas, research by Dr. F. G. Banting and Dr. Charles Best and colleagues at the University of Toronto led to the remarkable discovery of insulin for treating diabetes, as described in the June 9, 1923, Post article “Clearing the Skies for the Sugar-Poisoned” by Woods Hutchinson, A.M., M.D., who writes:

“Although the processes concerned were extremely complicated and progress correspondingly slow, we are now happily able to announce the first positive step toward the answer of the fateful riddle [why sugar builds up in the bloodstream], one that bids fair to give new hope to all diabetics.

“This is no less than the discovery of the hormone—Greek for stimulator—or spark juice, which enables our bodies to burn sugar and whose absence makes us diabetic.”

By May 15, 1948, the Post reported in “What Your Should Know About Diabetes” by Steven M. Spencer, that Dr. Priscilla White’s “baby-saving program” had dramatically decreased infant deaths by treating diabetic mothers with insulin shots during pregnancy. The US Public Health Service was conducting blood testing of entire communities, and leading expert Dr. Elliott Joslin (founder of today’s renowned Joslin Center in Boston) was described as a zealous archfoe of diabetes who was unmatched “in spreading hope among the known diabetics and urging intensive search for the unknown ones”.

Oral pills for older people with mild diabetes made their American debut in the August 24, 1957, issue of the Post. The article, “Good News for Diabetics” written by Milton Silverman, chronicled the accidental discovery and eventual controversial FDA approval of tolbutamide (Orinase). Early research by French physician Dr. Auguste Loubatieres in sulfa drugs ultimately gave rise to the new pill but was overlooked for more than a decade, wrote Silverman.

“Clearing the Skies for the Sugar-Poisoned” by Woods Hutchinson, published June 9, 1923. “What Your Should Know About Diabetes” by Steven M. Spencer, published May 15, 1948. “Good News for Diabetics” by Milton Silverman, published August 24, 1957.

Medical Breakthroughs: Past and Present The Saturday Evening Post

Helping Hearts

Given that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the country for both men and women, it’s no surprise that researchers are always looking for better procedures and devices to assist people with heart trouble. From the University of Michigan comes the recently approved HeartMate II, a device that’s implanted in the chest to help a failing heart pump blood and keep patients alive until they can receive a transplanted heart. The new device is smaller—about the size of a D-cell battery —than earlier versions of heart-assisting implants, making it more suitable for people with smaller bodies, like women and adolescents. According to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the HeartMate II helped 75 percent of 133 patients stay alive —and improved heart function and quality of life—for at least six months or until a donor heart became available. One patient even recovered to the point where a transplant was no longer needed.

Cool It

Folks in cardiac arrest need to be cooled down —and quickly—to improve their chance of recovery and to avoid brain damage. But how? Methods such as packing unconscious patients in ice can take hours, which makes survival dicey. Now, emergency medical personnel have the Thermosuit, a plastic suit filled with cold water that reduces body temperature in approximately 30 minutes. Survival rates have improved in the hospitals where the Thermosuit is in use; a National Institutes of Health-sponsored trial will soon be underway to test the device further.

Get Your Own Cells

The heart muscle tends to become weaker after a heart attack because it doesn’t regenerate itself well. One day, heart patients may be able to use their own skin cells to repair their hearts, using a new type of stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). Like embryonic stem cells, iPS cells have the potential to develop into any type of cell in the body. A team of scientists at University of California, Los Angeles has grown functioning cardiac cells in the lab using cells from mouse skin reprogrammed with iPS cells. Scientists hope that this will lead to heart patients using their own skin cells to create iPS lines that will repair and regenerate.

Suit Smarts

Fabrics are a basic human need. And now, “smart textiles” do more than the ancient functions of protecting us from the environment and making us look good. They can sense certain stimuli and adapt or respond accordingly, explains Tushar K. Ghosh, Ph.D., a textiles professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Among the many purposes are: protective gear for firefighters; garments that monitor patients’ vital signs like blood pressure and temperature; the delivery of drugs; and to serve as antibacterial or artificial skin for people with severe burns. In the works are fibers that mimic human muscle fibers, which hold promise for prosthetics and robotics. Ghosh and his team are researching a “heatingcooling garment, with fibers that get smaller or larger,” he says. “The idea is to create a piece of clothing that can let the wind come through or tune it closed if it gets too windy or cold.”

“No-Stick” Bandages

In the same vein, an electrical engineering researcher at Mississippi State University has developed a “smart” adhesive bandage that can check cholesterol, insulin, and blood chemistry without needles—a boon to people with diabetes who are used to sticking themselves many times per day. The bandage reads people’s biochemistry right through their skin. The inventor, Ray Winton, expects the bandage to be commercially available in one or two years.

Mag-netting Cancer Cells

Magnets: not just for science fair projects anymore! Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found a way to use magnets to catch cancer cells in the bodies of mice with ovarian cancer. They hope that this will be useful in diagnosing or slowing the spread of this deadly cancer in women. The way it may work: A peptide (a protein-like molecule) designed to attach to ovarian cancer cells is fastened to very tiny magnetic particles and injected into the abdomen. The peptides latch on to the cancer cells, and a magnetic filtering device outside the body pulls them out. Other researchers have developed magnetic nanoparticles that show promise for spotting and getting rid of harmful.

Crafty Solutions

Gas prices of late have convinced just about everyone that we need better ways to get around. For Leik Myrabo, Ph.D., an engineer-ing physics professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one answer is the Lightcraft. “The Light-craft will move goods and people around the planet in more environmentally friendly ways, using power from renewable energy sources, such as the sun or wind,” he explains. The Lightcraft doesn’t carry its own energy or fuel, instead moving by energy beamed to it from remote laser or microwave power plants, either on Earth or in space (hence the name Lightcraft, a hyperenergetic craft flying on a powerful beam of light). That means it can weigh significantly less than conventional vehicles, such as jet planes and rockets with their massive fuel loads. Myrabo has been working on the concept for more than 30 years, but only in the last few years have power-beaming sources become cheap enough to make the Lightcraft feasible. He estimates that in three to five years, his company, Lightcraft Technologies, Inc., will be able to launch something to the edge of space; moving people will follow within a few more years. “This is species-changing technology,” he says, “sustainable global mobility that will enable you to go anywhere on the planet in 45 minutes or to the moon in a few hours.”

The Future of Medicine is Now The Saturday Evening Post