Living in Alberta makes living with diabetes easier

Reading time: 6th protocol

By Gillian Rutherford
Contributor
Troy media

People like me who live with diabetes have a lot to celebrate. 100 years ago, insulin was discovered and purified by a group of Canadian scientists, including James Collip of the University of Alberta.

That discovery converted a death sentence from a diagnosis of diabetes to life imprisonment for living with a chronic illness.

James Collip

The daily trituration of tact, carbohydrate counting, and planning ahead – a dozen daily decisions to feel good in the short term and to avoid serious problems such as vision loss, kidney failure, amputation, or heart failure in the long term – is no fun.

But thanks to that breakthrough in 1921 and countless other advances since then, it is possible to live long and healthy lives with diabetes.

Here in Alberta, people with diabetes have a lot of help. The Alberta Diabetes Institute was founded at U of A in 2007 to focus on the prevention, treatment and ultimately cure of diabetes. It is a facility with laboratories for clinical studies, nutrition and exercise research. It is also a brain trust of more than 50 diabetes researchers, not only in medicine but also in law, life sciences, pharmacy, kinesiology, and public health.

They are responsible for major breakthroughs – like the famous Edmonton Protocol that set the global standard for islet cell transplants – and for our understanding of the complex balancing act between diet, exercise, and medication required for people like me to be able to cope with our every day Deal with diabetes day.

I feel blessed that all three of my diabetes specialists have been ADI members over the years, which means they could wander down the hallway to work together, keep up to date, and translate that into the best possible care.

I’m only one of 25 percent of Albertans who have prediabetes, type 1, type 2, or gestational diabetes. Mine is type 1, an autoimmune disease that destroys the cells that make insulin. It often happens to younger people – I was 17.

A Canadian Path To A Regenerative Cure For Type 1 Diabetes By Pat Beechinor

Managing diabetes every day is like sitting in a three-legged chair, weighing what to eat, how and when to exercise, and how to adjust medication. If you get any of them wrong, your blood sugar can drop or skyrocket, which can lead to organ and brain damage and even death. ADI researchers help people like me maintain that balance every day.

Helping people eat well

High blood sugar makes you tired, thirsty, and grumpy and can put you in a dangerous state called ketoacidosis. When my blood sugar is too low, I get shaky and have trouble making decisions, like whether it’s time to take some of the sugar pills I always have with me.

Knowing how to keep my blood sugar normal is based on years of experience and great teaching from my diabetes team, which includes an endocrinologist, nurse and nutritionist. I am lucky because my diabetes is not “brittle”, which means completely unpredictable and impossible to manage. I have never had low or high blood sugar that I couldn’t manage by myself, and luckily I never passed out or been hospitalized.

Without realizing it, I tapped into the collective knowledge that is constantly being advanced by researchers like those at the Alberta Diabetes Institute, including some who literally wrote the book on Living Good With Diabetes.

Catherine Chan

People like human nutritionist Catherine Chan, a professor in the Faculty of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences who was until recently Scientific Director of the Alberta Health Services Diabetes, Obesity and Nutrition Strategic Clinical Network, which connects research and practice for Albertans. Chan’s mother was told she had type 2 diabetes about 20 years ago, so she changed her diet and started using a bike. Now in her 90s, Chan’s mom is still treating her diabetes without medication.

Chan has dedicated her career to helping people choose what to eat and helping them make good choices consistently. She helped write the chapter on nutrition in the Diabetes Canada Clinical Practice Guidelines, some of the best in the world for their scientific rigor. She and her colleague Rhonda Bell are also co-authors of the Pure Prairie Eating Plan, a four-week menu that translates recommended guidelines into practical recipes and shopping lists of foods available in Alberta.

“When you’re trying to cope with a chronic illness, sometimes it’s just more convenient to grab a burger for the rest of your life,” said Chan. “Without privileges such as a good income and stable jobs, access to healthy food for people with diabetes becomes a matter of equal health opportunities.”

Growing evidence shows that a combination of weight loss achieved through diet and exercise plus early medication could even induce remission in some people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes. Chan is involved in a number of research projects to test this theory.

“Healing is too strong a word, but it would reduce human suffering many times over and ease the burden on the health system,” said Chan.

Optimizing physical activity

Here is an example of the type of day-to-day decision-making associated with diabetes. Last Saturday morning I went on a four hour bike ride. In anticipation of the workout, I cut my breakfast insulin by a third, but it took us longer to organize than I expected and by the time we were ready to roll my blood sugar levels skyrocketed. I felt lousy, but I took some extra insulin to correct it and went on my way. After an hour of cycling, I tested again and my blood sugar was back to normal. After another hour of driving, my blood sugar levels dropped … luckily we were pulling up at an ice cream parlor so I had a scoop. When we finished our ride, my blood sugar was exactly in the sweet zone. Done!

Balancing exercise is the specialty of another ADI member, to whom I owe the design of my care: Normand Boulé, professor and deputy dean of the faculty for kinesiology, sport and recreation, who works with a team of exercise physiologists in the ADIs diabetes laboratory for physical activity.

Boulé is part of the group behind the physical activity recommendations in the Diabetes Canada Clinical Practice Guidelines (which incorporate the work of the U of A), which show how to do a variety of activities like resistance training, swimming, and just getting up from your desk once an hour can amplify the benefits of the once recommended moderate aerobic exercise.

“We’re no longer trying to figure out whether exercise is good for people with diabetes because we know there are benefits,” said Boulé. “Now we are trying to optimize the training interventions to make them more effective.”

“It’s good to have options,” he noted, pointing out that people with diabetes are prescribed exercise not only for weight control, but also because of the immediate psychological (hello, endorphins!).

In a recent study, Boulé looked at whether exercising before breakfast is better for people with type 2 diabetes who have a morning spike in their blood sugar than later in the day.

Boulé and other ADI members are also working with researchers in Montreal and the UK to further study how diet and exercise can be combined to maintain remission in type 2 diabetics.

“We hope that with the additional movement we don’t have to tighten food restrictions so much, which makes the intervention more effective and sustainable,” said Boulé.

Recognize obstacles to care

And then there are these long-term complications that I keep mentioning. My personal worst nightmare is losing my eyesight. For Padma Kaul it is heart problems. The A University epidemiologist and professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry is involved in several large studies to examine the effects of diabetes on heart health in Canadians.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research funded their project to bring together data from Denmark and Alberta to study the effects of pregnancy factors, including diabetes during pregnancy, known as gestational diabetes, on maternal cardiovascular health over the long term.

A second study watches Albertaner aged 50 to 80 over a 10 year period to see how often they are screened for diabetes, how many develop diabetes, how many medications are being prescribed, and how their blood sugar levels affect their future heart health affects. Kaul is also studying what prescription drugs women take during pregnancy, including diabetes drugs, and how these affect the health of mothers and their babies.

“My job is to identify where we are having problems and try to understand the barriers patients face,” said Kaul, who studies health trends at the population level. She is also co-director of the Canadian VIGOR Center, the Heart & Stroke Chair in Cardiovascular Research, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Chair in Sex and Gender Differences in Diabetes.

Even before all the results are in, you can be sure that she will share her knowledge and best advice with her colleagues at the Alberta Diabetes Institute, that critical mass of basic scientists, clinical researchers, population health experts, and social scientists all out on the search – and pass it on – the best care for patients like me.

“Albertans should be sure that there is a whole community of researchers working for them here to try to fill some of the knowledge gaps and improve their health outcomes,” said Kaul.

It’s worth celebrating for me.

This article was submitted by the University of Alberta online magazine Folio. The University of Alberta is a Troy Media Partner for editorial content.

© Troy Media
Troy Media is an editorial content provider for media and its own hosted community news across Canada.

diabetes

source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/living-in-alberta-makes-living-with-diabetes-easier/