Jo’s Cafe

This feature has links to diabetes related news stories, blogs, or websites. If you come upon a story, blog or website that I haven’t mentioned, e-mail me.  

Glaxo resumes sale of diabetes drug
GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C. said yesterday that it would resume sales and promotion of its diabetes drug Avandamet after making government-ordered repairs at a plant and getting expanded approval for its use.

Manufacturing problems and on-again, off-again sales had forced tens of thousands of patients to switch to other treatments and jolted the stock price of GlaxoSmithKline, which has its headquarters in London with a U.S. headquarters in Philadelphia.

Federal marshals, in March last year, seized unsold U.S. shipments of Avandamet and other GlaxoSmithKline drugs on orders of the Food and Drug Administration. It said problems at the plant in Cidra, Puerto Rico, had caused Avandamet pills to have slightly too much of one active ingredient. The FDA did not order any recalls. It said the defective drugs were not harmful.

Pink Floyd Founder `Syd’ Barrett Dies From Diabetes
July 11 (Bloomberg) — Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett, a founding member of British rock band Pink Floyd, has died from symptoms related to diabetes, a spokesman for the band said today.

Diabetes and MS linked in Danish study
People with type 1 diabetes are more than three times more likely to develop multiple sclerosis (MS) than are those without diabetes, new research from Denmark shows.

In addition, the two diseases appear to be linked, albeit to a weaker extent, within families.

Both type 1 diabetes and MS are auto-immune diseases, in which the body mounts an aberrant immune response against its own tissues — attacking insulin-producing cells in the case of diabetes, and the myelin sheath surrounding neurons in MS. The new, population-based study is not the first to reveal an association between type 1 diabetes and MS. However, previous evidence had come from relatively small numbers of patients.

Fast Facts
Compared to whites, age-adjusted diabetes risk was more than 120% greater for blacks, about 76% greater for Hispanics, and 43% greater for Asians, the study shows.

Diet May Help Minorities’ Diabetes
(WebMD) Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics in the U.S. are more likely to get type 2 diabetes than whites. But, according to a new study, it may be easier for these minorities to cut their diabetes risk through better eating habits. Also, the study found, adding extra pounds may be especially dangerous for Asians.

Those are the findings in a new study in the July issue of Diabetes Care. Like plenty of past research on race, ethnicity, and diabetes, this study confirmed the greater diabetes risk for blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.

Diabetics Have Poor Tolerance to Hot Weather
We’ve sweltered for weeks here in Southern California in unseasonably hot weather, and the rest of the country has experienced the same. If you feel particularly wilted by the heat, it’s real, and not in your imagination. Tests have shown that diabetics generally have poorer heat tolerance than non-diabetics.

One such test, performed at the Loma Linda Medical Center in Loma Linda, California and published in the Journal of Applied Research, demonstrated that ” for all diabetic subjects (both type 1 and type 2) heat tolerance was poor. In fact, with a 30 minute exposure to an environmental temperature of 42ËšC, even though subjects were at rest, central body temperature increased 1ËšC more than that of controls. Further, skin temperature also increased.”

The Loma Linda physicians and scientists cited that the “concept of damage to skin circulation and sweat glands in patients with diabetes is not new.” and their study conclusively supported this concept.

… … … …

Jo’s Diabetes Links here.

Technorati Tag
Diabetes

Linked at: Basil’s Blog; Mark My Words