ARCHIVED - Research About – Diabetes

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The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is the Government of Canada's agency for health research. CIHR's mission is to create new scientific knowledge and to catalyze its translation into improved health, more effective health services and products, and a strengthened Canadian health-care system. Composed of 13 Institutes, CIHR provides leadership and support to more than 13,000 health researchers and trainees across Canada. Through CIHR, the Government of Canada invested approximately $35.4 million in 2008-09 in diabetes-related research.

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The Facts

• When the United Nations passed its landmark resolution in 2006 recognizing diabetes as a chronic, debilitating and costly disease, it was the first time a non-infectious illness had ever been declared a global health threat.*
• Type 2 diabetes used to be called "adult onset diabetes", as it usually occurred in people over the age of 40. As a result of the obesity epidemic, the condition is becoming increasingly common in young people, including teenagers.**
• More than 2 million Canadians have diabetes. An estimated 246 million people worldwide have the disease, a number that is expected to hit 380 million by 2025.***

Sources:
* International Diabetes Foundation, United Nations Resolution on Diabetes;
** Canadian Diabetes Association;
*** Canadian Diabetes Association.

Finding Solutions

New blood: breakthrough could aid long-time diabetics

Dr. David Hess of the University of Western Ontario has found a way to grow new blood vessels. This breakthrough comes as good news to long-time diabetics who sometimes develop peripheral artery disease because of reduced blood flow in their limbs. With support from CIHR, Dr. Hess isolated three types of stem cells from human bone marrow and injected them into mice to form new blood vessels and improve blood flow. The results of the research appeared in the journal Blood, and now Aldagen, an American biopharmaceutical company, has won FDA approval to conduct a clinical trial of Dr. Hess's technique in 21 patients with end-stage peripheral artery disease.

Diabetes training inspires pharmacists to ramp up activities

The more diabetes management training pharmacists receive, the more engaged they become in activities that help people with the disease, a CIHR-funded study has found. Dr. Scot Simpson of the University of Alberta surveyed pharmacists in his province, grouping them by training: Certified Diabetes Educators, pharmacists who had completed one or more diabetes-specific continuing education courses, or pharmacists with no diabetes-specific training. He found that Certified Diabetes Educators conducted significantly more activities, such as patient education in self-monitoring of blood glucose, hypoglycemia management, and drug therapy, than pharmacists with less training. Pharmacists with advanced training also held more positive attitudes toward diabetes and its management. The study was published in May in the Canadian Pharmacists Journal.

Gut cells reprogrammed to produce insulin

A team of Canadian researchers has come up with a new approach to treating diabetes. The CIHR-supported team, led by Dr. Timothy Kieffer of the University of British Columbia, has discovered a way to engineer cells lining the gut to take over insulin production from the pancreas. While diabetes can be treated, millions of people worldwide face the daily challenge of monitoring their blood sugar levels and taking injections to compensate for insufficient insulin production from pancreatic beta cells. If Dr. Kieffer's procedure works in humans, life would become much less complicated for the many people who suffer from insulin-dependent diabetes. This promising new research – currently involving animal studies – was published in the Journal of Molecular Medicine.

For More Information

CIHR's Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes (CIHR-INMD) is working to advance our understanding of healthy eating, active living and healthy body weights, and reduce the burden associated with obesity and obesity-related diseases, such as diabetes, through excellence in health research. To learn more about these priorities and other CIHR-INMD activities, please visit the Institute's website.

For more information, go to ARCHIVED - Your Health Research Dollars at Work.