Category Archives: research

education, family, health, JDRF, Juvenile Diabetes, research

It's a matter of continuing education

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The JDRF teen council for Vancouver Island put together a video to go out on YouTube as a way of raising awareness among their peer group and anyone with sufficient tech savvy to operate the site about diabetes and the upcoming walk. Our daughter is one of the teens on there and Mark was asked to help with editing the final version.

It’s a fun thing for the kids, of course and Mark likes anything that involves technology. We’ve all posted the final product on our facebook accounts and forwarded it to anyone who isn’t connected otherwise. Seems pretty straightforward.

Maybe it’s ’cause we live with this so much, so constantly, we were pretty sure it covered the bases but there is still room for a few of the old misconceptions to creep in to what it’s all about. Since posting the video a friend of ours did a commentary on his podcast about it. This is a good thing as his podcast is far more popular than ours. This is the “any publicity is good publicity” school of thought. Anyway, somewhere in his meditation he started talking about the epidemic of diabetes and how we need to pay attention to nutrition and to exercise more.

I’m sure he didn’t realize it but it sounded a lot like he was speaking of diabetes as if it was all one illness. I’m sure that wasn’t his intention and that he was leading from one thought to another without necessarily drawing a line between them. So, with all due respect, I’m gonna spin a little on this one small issue that plagues diabetics.

Hands up anyone, how many types of diabetes are there? Anyone? Hello?

Who guessed 3? And how many can be traced to lifestyle? 1- unless you consider pregnancy a lifestyle.

There’s Type 1, aka Juvenile Diabetes or Insulin Dependent Diabetes. It is the result of an auto-immune reaction by the body towards the cells in the pancreas that manufacture insulin. So far there is no known reason for it, no cause, no detectable trigger. Of course there are a lot of theories – and I’m not talking about the dancing under a full moon without one’s foil helmet theories that seem to abound – some of which tie other auto-immune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis as a possible family genetic link. Why it starts is still at the white mice and electron microscope stage.

Then there’s Type 2 or Adult Onset diabetes. This is the one that is causing all the fuss, grabbing all the headlines. It is becoming epidemic in our society and it is controllable by diet and exercise. To some extent it is inevitable because as we age our insulin production decreases and the cellular tendency to resist insulin increases. The scary thing is it is appearing in children and this is what grabs the headlines. Long story short, over fed, under exercised children are at risk of Type 2 diabetes BUT not all children who have diabetes are Type 2.

When you have an infant, however, that is diabetic you can be pretty sure it isn’t because mom was using chocolate milk for the 2:00 am feeding.

The 3rd type of diabetes is Gestational Diabetes. It can occur in the 2nd trimester of pregnancy but more often in the 3rd trimest. It looks a lot like Type 2 in that there is increased insulin resistance and an inability of the pancreas to produce sufficient insulin and may require insulin injections for the mom. The American Diabetes webpage has a decent amount of information on the subject; here’s a link to their page on gestational diabetes. I’ve used the American site because it seems the Canadian site is mostly concerned with Type 2 issues.

So, yes, it is important to eat right, exercise and take care of your body – eat leafy greens, take vitamins and cram in fibre. Every day another page gets written in the owner’s manual of this lump of mortal flesh and we really can’t afford to skip the few basics we know actually work. Eat right, get plenty of fresh air, look both ways before crossing the street and work together to keep learning as much as we can.

Oh, and to always say thank you.

family, Juvenile Diabetes, research

Cap in Hand

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It’s getting to that time of year when fund raising activities start to focus on one specific event. The JDRF walk is next month and now we start going to friends and family asking them to sponsor us in this walk. It is a way to feel like we’re actually doing something.

To some degree it is symbolic but every penny adds up, y’know, and research is the only way – it is getting close – but even a million dollars here or there only pays for mouse chow, in the scheme of things. The real money comes from the pharmaceutical companies. JDRF lays the groundwork in terms of theoretical research and then big pharma steps in with money to refine it in terms of something useful to them, something marketable.

I remember way back in the late 60’s when these walk things began, the pledge was for so much per mile or per lap (when the swimathons started up). The first walkathon was 25 miles and it took place in one day and boy were my feet sore by the end of it. I was with my best friend, Mariane, we walked all over Edmonton, ate junk food and drank lots of pop. When we finally got to the end I phoned Dad for a ride home then went behind some hoarding and puked up what seemed like everything I’d eaten that day – grape, onion and garlic flavoured lumps of something formerly potato-like.

But I digress, nowadays, walkathons are everywhere for just about everything and are only a few kilometers. I’m much older, however, and find even a few klicks when going up and down and through bushes and in the middle of a big crowd just aren’t that much fun. Especially the crowd part. Being short I tend to get claustrophobic in crowds because I can’t really see where I’m going.

So, is it ethical to get people to donate money to an organization that supports desperately needed research based on the premise of walking a certain distance and then bail after walking a short way then back again? Bearing in mind one of my ankles is severely arthritic and I have mild asthma and the money is the same whether I walk 10 kilometers or 10 feet.

Now, if there was an actual relationship between the distance walked and the actual progress made on a specific research project, I’d go around that damn lake 10 times. But there isn’t. It takes a lot of pledges to feed those mice and they’re the ones that are going the distance in making change happen.

So this is the time of year to go around to friends and those family members who aren’t here and able to participate themselves in the walk, cap in hand, knuckle to forehead, asking for a few more pennies. It’s at this point in time I think to myself I hope they find the cure if only so I don’t have to go through this process anymore.