Drug delivery
The digital D
iabetes is stressful. Stress makes it worse. Both ‘fight’ and ‘flight’ take energy, so hormones like cortisol and adrenaline actively inhibit the uptake of insulin, which pushes up blood sugar levels. This feels bad enough for a non-diabetic in a situation they can’t resolve with their feet or fists, but for a person with diabetes stress can easily result in further illness. In the short term, elevated blood sugar levels can lead to hyperglycaemia, meaning nausea, headaches, tiredness, blurred vision, and weight loss, as well as recurring bladder and skin infections. Prolonged high blood sugar levels can increase the risk of life-altering complications like neuropathy and retinopathy.
World Pharmaceutical Frontiers /
www.worldpharmaceuticals.net
health game
Some of the most ground-breaking results come when technologies are combined with the same ambition in mind. Advances in pharmaceuticals will continue to change people’s lives, but there’s a growing interest in complementing them with digital devices designed to encourage and reinforce healthy behaviours as part of a holistic treatment plan. Taking diabetes as an example, Søren Smed Østergaard, Novo Nordisk’s VP of digital health, tells Tim Gunn where the key benefits of combining pharmaceuticals and digital therapeutics lie, and why there are challenges when it comes to implementing a connected approach.
Unhelpfully, the knowledge that failing to control stress levels might eventually result in blindness or the loss of a foot doesn’t do much to lower them. And while just having diabetes might seem like enough of a problem by itself, treating and managing it can often add to the strain. Living with the condition means learning to dose and deliver one’s own insulin using needles and mathematical calculations – adding that tang of exam anxiety to the toxic hormonal mix.
If only that were all. When they’re first diagnosed, type one diabetics are often already very ill. Sufferers, who are usually first impacted as children and young teenagers, might only be
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Towfiqu ahamed barbhuiya; rumka_vodki/
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