Letter From The Editor

I was giving a recent talk to some medical professionals and mentioned that our country’s largest export was diabetes. Now there is a new report indicating that China has overtaken both the US and India as the country with the highest number of diabetes patients. (See this week’s Item #14.) …

I spent a good amount of time in front of the computer this week reading about the new Healthcare bill passed by Congress last weekend. Just when I thought I had it all figured out there were a couple of things that had to be resolved by the House and …

Thanks to all of you who stopped and visited with us at our booth at the APhA annual meeting in Washington last week. Many of you were very focused on learning more about diabetes care and how you could work with other clinicians to help manage patients. As I wandered …

March 15, 2010 — SPECIAL NEWSFLASH!: Amylin, Lilly and Alkermes received a Complete Response Letter from FDA for Exenatide Once Weekly. New drug to be called BYDUREON (exenatide for extended-release injectable suspension). For more information, click on this link: Exenatide Once Weekly FDA Update *************************************************************** Steve, Andrew and I are …

Obesity and weight control in our patients continues to be big news each and every week. The new issue of the ADA magazine, “Diabetes Forecast,” has an 8 page spread on surgery for weight loss. The article does a great job of showing the benefits versus the risks of bariatric surgery. …

It appears that the FDA and Congress are trying to deal a final blow to GSK’s Avandia. The legislators have spent hundreds of hours reviewing tons of research and have decided that GSK withheld info about the potential for problems. (See Item #1.) To their credit GSK has decided to …

Last week we had a commentary from one of our feature writers, Sheri Colberg, Ph.D., FACSM, on the program with Dr. Mehmet Oz and Oprah Winfrey about diabetes. At first I thought that it would blow over and patients would forget what they had heard, but this week in a …

Last week two of the most influential people on healthcare caused an uproar among diabetes experts. Dr. Mehmet Oz and Oprah Winfrey did a show about the diabetes problem titled "America’s Silent Killer." While most of us think that any information on how big the problem of diabetes is good, …

Last week there was a lot of press about the approval of Victoza (c) liraglutide, the once-a-day GLP-1 mimetic, made by Novo Nordisk. This drug, which works like exenatide, gives practitioners another choice of therapy for patients. If you read all the articles on the internet you will find a …

Recently there has been a great deal of attention placed on pharmacogenomics and how drugs will work with patients who have variants of different genes. Now this same gene variant testing may identify which patients are more likely to get diabetes. Recently an international team of researchers analyzed about 2.5 …