VIDEO: Developments in diabetes care give patients ‘the prospect of doing much better’

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You know, the overarching development in type 2 diabetes, of course, it is the chronic epidemic of our times. I was about to say that these are not human-made problems, but they are societal pressures, societal changes, You know, having enough food around for the population is, of course, a good thing in general, but apparently, we are prone to gain weight and also decrease the amount of physical activity we do. And those two factors in combination with underlying genetic risk has made diabetes just the most common chronic, severe disease that there is, not just in the US but worldwide. So that's the first thing, the epidemic nature of diabetes now, and it used to be that type 2 diabetes 100 years ago was actually relatively rare, I mean, certainly compared to what it is today. So that's number one. Number two, I would say is that mostly academic investigators, but then pushed by the pharmaceutical industry has been the development of new classes of drugs to treat type 2 diabetes, which is the epidemic form. And as everyone knows, if you watch television, you know, these are the dancing people taking Wegovy and all, you know, all the GLP agonists, receptor agonists, and then the SGLT2s. The number of new diabetes medications, oral and injectable, have grown just enormously over the last 10 years, just a huge increase. So that's number two. For type 1 diabetes, which generally is not of similar interest to most because it's relatively rare, the ability to treat type 1 diabetes more physiologically to provide glucose levels in the short-term and hemoglobin A1C levels in the longer term that are closer to normal has really changed the future of people with type 1 diabetes. Back, you know, 40, 50 years ago, people with type 1 diabetes, by the time they were at 50 years old, the majority of them had died from complications. Kidney disease, heart disease have been the cause of deaths, but also blind and with renal failure and amputations. That has changed dramatically because of better understanding of what causes those complications and our ability to control not only glycemia but also other risk factors, cholesterol, blood pressure, et cetera. So, you know, diabetes in the long-term looks different these days because people are no longer dying as prematurely as they did in the past. And with good care, team effort, nutritionists, clinicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, and educators, people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes have the prospect of doing much, much better.