New devices could lessen diabetic pain

AHMEDABAD: For diabetic patients, painful needle pricks for insulin and blood glucose tests would soon be a thing of the past. Recent advances could make diabetes a comfortable disease to live with.City diabetologists, who recently attended the International Diabetes Federation in Paris say that while diabetes could affect 30 crores by 2025, newly discovered treatment options would make it easier to manage.Thus for 10-year-old Rohan the routine insulin injections and painful pricks for glucose monitoring may soon be a thing of the past."The clinical trials for many types of insulin inhalers and other forms of insulin intake mechanisms are on. In some parts of the world insulin inhalers are being tried. They are similar to inhalers used by asthma patients. All that a patient would need to do is inhale" says diabetologist Mayur Patel, who returned from the conference recently.His colleague Parag Shah says, "I expect that within a year insulin inhalers would be here. Another innovation is infrared gluco meters where no needle pricks are needed for testing sugar levels. There is a ''gluco watch'', a device that indicates when the blood sugar level is high and the patient needs insulin. This may take a few more years," he says.According to Patel, research has also helped to indicate that secondary problems as a result of diabetes can be diagnosed early so that they can be reversed and treated before it is irreversible."In most cases patients of type II diabetes realise too late that their kidney is adversely affected or their eye sight is lost. However, we now have special tests that can help to diagnose the problem before it is too late," he said.O P Gupta who has written extensively on India being a pandemic zone for diabetes says, "Diabetes is pandemic to India and we see an increased prevalence of the problem here. There is considerable research even in the field of gene therapy in this field. These studies may be able to detect the genes that cause diabetes and foetal studies would be able to treat the problem", he said.Gupta said that in addition to inhalers there is another non invasive insulin device similar to a patch which can be applied on the skin."The clinical trials have found it to be effective up to 60 per cent. Though it is not ready for the market yet, it would soon be. Just three years ago it was a concept that did not promise more than 30 per cent success," he says.