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Image courtesy of Novo Nordisk

The Diabetes Barometer

Barometers have never quite conjured up the image of ~80 pages of hard hitting truths and revealing statistics on diabetes. At least not until a week before World Diabetes Day 2007 when Novo Nordisk published the first report of its Changing Diabetes Barometer. It has taken us a fair amount of time to understand the important role this vast "global pressure gauge" will play in diabetes as this epidemic unfolds.

The Novo Nordisk Changing Diabetes Barometer is an annual collection of facts, figures, ideas, and innovations based on data collected nationally and internationally. Lise Kingo, Executive Vice President at Novo Nordisk, best explained the concept of the barometer when she said, "We have been driving the fight against diabetes in the dark for far too long. We need to put the lights on. We need to keep score of our shared efforts against diabetes to drive sustainable change." While patients, families, physicians, and industry attack diabetes from multiple angles, it is important to keep a record of all approaches, progress ,and results. This record will help thought-leaders to better map out new research directions since we cannot know where we're going if we do not know where we have been.

In this first volume of the Barometer, Novo Nordisk covered 21 pilot countries. They highlighted the achievements of a subset of these countries that have had national diabetes associations for long enough to have faced substantial challenges and overcome them. The report discusses trends key to diabetes prevention and management globally. One finding, for example, was that only a third of the countries studied regularly track key measures like blood glucose, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels. To boot, the report found that very few of the countries have the right systems in place to accurately measure diabetes statistics.

We look forward to the second volume, which will provide further examples of best practices in diabetes worldwide and include information on the Changing Diabetes Barometer Scholarship.

A letter of concern to the New York Times

Dr. Lawrence Soler of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) wrote a letter to the New York Times on November 27 regarding what we would agree was a substantial oversight in a November 20 piece entitled "Twins on a Medical Odyssey After a Diagnosis of Diabetes". The touching story describes how Ali Newman's diagnosis of type 1 diabetes may have been enough of a forewarning to prevent a similar diagnosis in her twin sibling, Marissa.

Marissa is the first enrollee for an oral insulin study run by the Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet - a network of diabetes research centers funded by multiple organizations including the NIH/NIDDK, JDRF and the American Diabetes Association.

What Dr. Soler points out in his abridged letter is that, despite the promising work being done on diabetes, "the program that is paying for this research may well be closed down unless Congress takes action by year's end [2007]." In a conversation with diaTribe, he mentioned that 35 percent of federal type 1 funding will be lost if the NIH's Type 1 Special Diabetes Statutory Funding Program is not renewed. This could potentially affect 60,000 clinical research participants.

He called on diaTribe to help get the message out about the JDRF's Promise to Remember Me Campaign, where ordinary families affected by diabetes contact their Congressional representatives. This is the JDRF's top legislative priority and you can help this effort by visiting http://promise.jdrf.org/. Check out diaTribe Editor Kelly Close's blog on this campaign. Let's go out and get some promises! What else can you do? Think about reimbursement, another big priority, and sign our petition that we're going to send to governments around the globe to show them we really care!