Guest Post by Jennie Park, JDRF Volunteer:

After being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1983 at age 7, my family and I relied on our visits to the doctor to get the information we needed.  Since doctors only have a limited amount of time to spend with patients, it isn’t a surprise that 29 years later I’m still learning about my disease.  When Dr. Christine Lee, an avid supporter of the Northern California JDRF chapter and mom of a type 1 son, asked me to appear in the DVD for Optimal Life: The Essentials of Diabetes, I was honored.  I thought I would be giving insight into living with the disease. And while that turned out to be true, what surprised me was how much I learned about this disease from Dr. Lee so long after my diagnosis.

Dr. Lee founded her company Optimal Life (www.optimalife.net), with one goal in mind: to demystify the medicine surrounding diabetes by providing an easy, step-by-step guide to understand and control the disease.  Her two disc series, The Essentials of Diabetes, covers everything from how to avoid complications to using glucagon in case of an emergency.   She has followed this with her newest book, The Essentials of Insulin, which goes into detail about how to figure a correction dosage, proper carb counting, and even reviews how to adjust for travel.  She covers the disease quite well and it really is a one stop shop for everything you need to know about diabetes.

The best part is that Dr. Lee is giving a portion of every sale of The Essentials of Diabetes to JDRF to fund a cure for type 1.  Thank you, Dr. Lee, for putting a face to this disease, and giving back to help find a cure for type 1.

To learn more about Optimal Life and Dr. Lee’s other books, visit www.optimalife.net.

Why are my friends my #1?

I’m often asked, “you don’t have T1D in your family, why do you support JDRF?”  Simple, my friends, the people tied to JDRF. For nearly 20 years I’ve donated time and efforts primarily for children’s charitable organizations.

About 7 years ago, I met the people at JDRF, all who are eager to find a cure for T1D.  Many organizations have a cause, and they have great people, but JDRF people are special…they are passionate, from the volunteers, to board members and to the staff, this is not just a job, but something to pursue.

I was blessed to have healthy kids, so I’m happy to help where I can for a truly great cause, JDRF.

-Mel Scott
JDRF Board Member
Passport to a Cure Gala Chair

It’s my kid – my grown-up daughter Julia – who drives my desire for a cure for type 1 diabetes. I want to cure T1D because it’s in her way – in the way of uninterrupted nights of sleep if she gets low, in the way of those “straight lines” we love – to the movies without worrying about highs or lows, on an eight-mile training run through the coast range, in the decision about whether to buy the form-fitting sheath dress or tight jeans without pockets that pose challenges for her pump, and in the constant hassle about health coverage.

I don’t think about T1D too much unless I’m watching Julia use a big needle to insert her insulin pump’s cannula at a new location on her tummy, or when I rant about health care access to a startled fellow swimmer in the Civic Center pool’s locker room. Julia has undergraduate and graduate degrees, she’s worked in Spain and at diabetes camps, taught university writing classes, written grants for academic journals, produced stories for local radio stations and did I mention her three half-marathons, numerous 10K runs and exuberant water ski turns?

Julia is why I gently badger my friends and family for donations to our Walk to Cure Diabetes team each year, why I like it when Eric, Claighton or Elizabeth ask me to help our JDRF chapter, and why I understand it’s not just because it’s fun to dress up and eat with friends that brings people to our annual fundraising galas.

We want to cure T1D. Julia is why I volunteer to write news releases about our chapter’s Walks that take us around the State Capitol and through Old Sacramento the first Sunday of every October. It’s why I contact the Sacramento Bee, the Davis Enterprise, the Chico Enterprise-Record, the local NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox and Univision affiliates along with Capital Public Radio and all the other print and online media I can think of to let folks know about our Passports to a Cure fundraising galas. I feel like we’re making progress when we promote the golf tournament, the crab feed, the new trail run fundraiser, Eric’s school walk teams, and anything else our hardworking Northern California Inland Chapter of JDRF can come up with.

I love to be around others who share my desire to make diabetes evaporate, go “poof,” fall off the face of the earth. Research breakthroughs for a cure and the amazing progress we’ve seen in treatment and preventing T1D is thrilling.

I’ve learned a lot from this chronic disease, the most important thing being appreciating each moment.

Which is why I enjoy laughing at Julia’s wonderful dog cartoons, take such pleasure in her brilliant 100-word stories, and love cheering as she crosses the finish line of yet another big race. Dudette, we’re closing in on a cure.

-Lyra Halprin
Dedicated JDRF Volunteer

Bradley was diagnosed over 10 years ago with T1D at the age of four and a half.  My family and I were in shock because we had only heard of diabetes but had no idea what living with the disease would be like.  My family and I took the news of Brad’s diagnosis very hard. Brad did not understand at first, but it did not take him long to notice he was being treated differently. Although he was a normal kid in the eyes of most people, he seemed like a fragile piece of glass to us. My family always tried to make him feel comfortable and show him support because he always asked us what he did to deserve this disease.  That was extremely heartbreaking to hear, especially coming from my little brother who was not even five yet. Nothing my family could have done would have prevented Brad from living with T1D.

When Brad was diagnosed, I was 16 years old and felt confused as to what I could do to help. I had high school to deal with, which for a teenage girl was very important, but I was sure I made time to learn about T1D. I am very protective of my little brother and wanted to be ready to explain to people what it was like for Brad to live with T1D and educated them about the disease.

Over the past 10 years, I have spoken with a lot of people about T1D and have educated them on the disease. I have come to realize that there is a general confusion between type 1 and type 2 diabetes. There have been times where I have had to tell people my brother can eat whatever he wants in moderation and YES he can have ice cream and it does not have to be sugar free.

Now that I am older and I understand T1D better, I decided it was time to be proactive and get my entire family involved with JDRF. At this year’s Gala, my mom and I volunteered to sell raffle tickets at the event to try to raise as much money as we could, knowing that over 80% of that money would go to research. For my mom and I, it was very motivating and inspiring to see so many people come together to raise money to find a cure. My husband and I also ran in the Coloma River Run, and my brother ran with us and finished 6^th overall in the 5k. Unlike some of the other JDRF events, there were many people who attended who had no connection to T1D. They simply love to run. I was thankful for the many participants in the race and hope they learned something about JDRF and T1D.

I always believe it is the little things that count. Whether it is volunteering at an event or raising money for a run or walk, we are all helping to bring awareness to T1D and JDRF.  I am thankful to get to spend time with my brother and show him that his entire family supports him and wants to find a cure.

We all want a cure for T1D, but until then I will keep volunteering and help educate people until a cure is found.

-Katrina Lorenzen
Dedicated JDRF Volunteer

I will remember September 7, 2005 for the rest of my life. I was 16 years old and like most teenagers, I felt invincible. I was on the varsity volleyball team, played in my high school marching band, and was involved in countless school activities. I had a lot of friends and knew the majority of the 2,000 students at my school. My mom, Debbie, and dad, Fran, and my brother, Alex supported me in every thing I did. But none of that could protect me from being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, T1D.

At 16, I felt angry that I was stripped of the life I once knew. Many of the emotions I felt, frustration, animosity, resentment, were not typical feelings I felt up to that point in my life. It was almost as if I was grieving the loss of a life I knew I would never have again. But as time passed, I got used to the many injections, finger pricks, and doctor appointments. That was my life now. I knew if I sat around and felt sorry for myself, I would be letting T1D win, and that was not something I was prepared to do.

Almost immediately after I was diagnosed, I heard about JDRF. I was given a Bag of Hope and Ruby, the teddy bear with T1D, quickly became my best friend. My mom even made her a volleyball jersey to match mine. I was number 13, she was 13.5.  A month after diagnosis, I participated in my very first Walk to Cure Diabetes at the Sacramento State Capitol. It was amazing to see 5,000 people in attendance showing their support of T1D. Although I knew only a handful of people at the Walk, I felt the dedication and love from everyone who was there that day. I remember thinking to myself, if an organization like JDRF could put on such an amazing event, I needed to get involved and see how I could be a part of finding a cure for the disease I live with each and every day.

Six years, ten months, and thirty days of T1D, four years of college, two years of interning for JDRF and a semester of college in Australia later, and I am now working for an organization that I have always known I wanted to work for, JDRF. Although a huge part of my life changed on September 7, 2005, what has never changed is my passion to make a difference and be a part of finding a cure for type 1 diabetes. I am proud to be a part of the T1D family, even though admission to the club is a huge price to pay. I told myself when I was diagnosed that I was not going to let T1D run my life, and I never have. I have not let living with T1D get in the way of anything that I ever wanted to do. I come to work every day hoping that one day I won’t have to come to work any more. Not because I don’t LOVE my job, but because what I would love even more is to live in a world where people do not have to live with T1D.

-Elizabeth Dixon
JDRF Staff Member

By Coach Eartl

Question: What’s the best piece of advice you can give me as a first time rider?

Allow the JDRF Ride to change your life. One of the most rewarding parts of working as a coach with JDRF riders like yourselves is that I get to witness how many get hooked on riding and adopt a healthier lifestyle. As Tim St.Clair loves to say, each JDRF Ride can be a life changing event. This is so true in many ways. Obviously we want to change the lives of everyone with Type 1 diabetes. Think how it will feel when we can say we have found a cure and to know that we all helped in some small way. But the JDRF Ride can be a personal life changing event for you as well. I’ve seen a number of people who started out doing the Ride as a fund raiser or because a friend or family member was recently diagnosed, and then discovered that they really enjoyed bike riding, and have kept it up year after year. The telltale sign that someone is hooked on cycling is when they buy a bike for the JDRF ride and the next year they upgrade to a better bike! They start training in some fashion throughout the winter and start riding more and earlier the next spring. Does this sound like you? I hope so. You can use the JDRF Ride experience to change your life and become more active, more fit, lose weight if you need to, and become more healthy. Exercise is the real fountain of youth, so by creating a more active lifestyle, you can literally act and feel younger than your years. So while our main purpose for doing the JDRF Ride is to fund and find a cure, go ahead and use it turn help turn your life around too!

About Coach David Ertl

David Ertl has served as the Ride Coach for the JDRF Greater Iowa Chapter since 2004. David is a professional cycling coach who coaches the Des Moines Cycle Club Race Team and several individual recreational and competitive cyclists. He is author of the book, “101 Cycling Workouts”. David has been a competitive cyclist since 1973.

The other day my twelve-year-old daughter looked up from her two pieces of French toast. She stared at me across the breakfast table with eyes that are the exact shade of blue as her older brother’s and said, “Why do you always give Will more?”

“Because he’s two years older and twenty pounds heavier than you are,” I answered firmly.

“Oh,” Gigi said, in a subtly combative tone, pleased I was joining her in this little tussle. “Is that why he always gets the best peach and the best berries? Is that why he always gets the unburnt toast?”

Reader, I do not often burn toast. When I do (charcoal being a carcinogen), I feed it to our compost pail, not my children.

But I will admit that I do give my son, who was diagnosed with T1D a little over two years ago, preferential treatment.

I like to think that this treatment is mostly limited to mealtimes, though I’m probably wrong. What I explained to Gigi and her brothers that morning is this:

Will has a slightly different relationship to what he eats.

When he was injecting insulin for the first year of his diabetes, his experience with food suddenly became fraught.

In order for his body to access the glucose in the carbohydrates in Will’s food, we have to calculate the ratio of insulin to carbohydrates as accurately as possible. When he was injecting insulin, we had to do this while also trying to administer as few injections as possible. Will had to decide exactly what he wanted to eat for the next few hours. Which wasn’t easy for an athletic, rapidly growing, twelve-year-old boy!

Now that Will is pumping insulin and we no longer inject, life is somewhat easier. These days, if Will is legitimately hungry just an hour after dinner and he wants to pour himself a massive bowl of Froot Loops for dessert, he can simply dial the bolus of insulin into the pump instead of having to suffer another shot.

Still, when I hand Will a dinner plate with brown rice and chicken and carrots and peaches and berries, Will has pretty much no choice but to eat all of the carbohydrates he has “covered” with insulin. He is the only one in our very loose household who has to finish everything on his plate, whether he feels like it or not.

I admit it! I do try to ensure that Will’s peach isn’t mealy and that his carrots don’t have crazy root filaments or brown rings at the end.

I try to make it so that the food my kid has little choice but to eat, is food that he will enjoy.

But there’s one more thing.

It just may also be true that Will gets the juiciest melon and the crispest apples because he has always been tractable and easygoing, the kind of kid who does what I ask the first time and who almost never pushes back. When I ask him to take out the recycling he puts down his book and says, “Okay,” making a joke with me or with our dogs as he finishes the chore. While I have to nag at his sister, I can honestly say that I cannot remember, not once, raising my voice at Will.

At the end of breakfast, Will brought his empty plate and glass to the sink. He rinsed them. He put them in the dishwasher.

My creative and strong-willed and bright daughter’s plate—with half the French toast and five organic strawberries floating in the lake of syrup she’d helped herself to after I’d poured her the amount I thought appropriate—sat in the middle of the breakfast table, waiting for me to clear it.

The JDRF Los Angeles Chapter has recently procured these screen print posters – limited edition of 200.

Buy from JDRF’s Official Ebay Account →

These prints were created exclusively by artist, Shepard Fairey for JDRF and have been signed and numbered by the artist. The image is based on War By Numbers Print in Red and all proceeds from the sale of these limited prints will go toward JDRF.

Dr. Dick Insel, JDRF’s Chief Scientific Officer, and Kerry Morgan, 2011 JDRF Children’s Congress delegate, talk about the future of diabetes and biotechnology.

REMOVAL, a multi-site, international trial will test whether metformin helps prevent the development of a common complication associated with type 1 diabetes

JDRF-funded researchers have begun enrolling adult patients with type 1 diabetes (T1D) in the REMOVAL study, to test whether metformin-a drug commonly used to treat type 2 diabetes-could help prevent or reduce the risk of cardiovascular complications in people with T1D.

The REMOVAL study (Reducing with MetfOrmin Vascular Adverse Lesions in T1D) is a multi-center, international trial that will study 500 patients with T1D aged 40 or older, a patient group known to be at higher risk for cardiovascular disease, one of the leading causes of death associated with diabetes. A study from the United Kingdom has shown that people with T1D aged over 40 are at much higher risk for cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke. [1]

The REMOVAL study will follow patients for five years. In the study, metformin or a placebo will be added to regular insulin therapy. The study will also test the drug’s effects on the control of diabetes and treatment satisfaction, as well as its effects on other complications, such as diabetic eye disease. Metformin has a proven safety record based on over 50 years of use in people with type 2 diabetes to help control blood glucose levels.

The study is being led by Professor John Petrie from the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom (primary investigator) and Professor Helen Colhoun from the University of Dundee, United Kingdom, and is recruiting participants in five countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The REMOVAL study will be supported in Canada and Australia by the Canadian and Australian governments through the JDRF Canadian Clinical Trial Network (CCTN) and the JDRF Australian Clinical Research Network (CRN), respectively.

“Given what we know about metformin, we are eager to learn whether its benefits, when added to insulin therapy, could have a positive impact on the health and lives of people with type 1 diabetes who are at risk for cardiovascular problems,” said Dr. Petrie. “As we follow the participants in the REMOVAL trial, we will be able to gather key information that could help physicians understand whether this patient population might benefit from this combined therapy.”

JDRF, the leading charitable funder of T1D research worldwide, is supporting the REMOVAL study as part of its efforts to discover and develop treatments for the devastating complications that can arise from T1D-an autoimmune disease that affects as many as 3 million Americans and has no known cause or cure. It is one of the largest trials ever funded by JDRF targeted at reducing the complications of T1D.

“JDRF is dedicated to people with type 1 diabetes, and an important part of that commitment involves the discovery and development of therapies for diabetes complications,” said Aaron Kowalski, assistant vice president of treatment therapies for JDRF. “Cardiovascular complications are very real dangers for many people with this disease, which is why research like the REMOVAL study is urgently needed. Better therapies could not only improve the health of people living with type 1, but could save lives.”

To learn more about the REMOVAL trial, please visit: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01483560

About metformin

Metformin is an oral, widely-prescribed first-line drug for type 2 diabetes, and is available in generic forms in several countries. It has been on the market in some European countries for more than 50 years. It was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for type 2 diabetes in 1994. Metformin works by preventing high blood sugar, but evidence also exists that it can improve blood vessel function, reduce risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and improve the action of insulin on the liver, even for people without diabetes. These potentially beneficial properties could also reduce risk in T1D. In fact, metformin has already been approved for use in T1D in France and Portugal. Approval in the United States would require evidence that metformin not only reduces cardiovascular risk, but could prevent heart attacks and/or strokes. REMOVAL is a necessary gateway trial into this more extensive research.

About T1D

In T1D, a person’s pancreas stops producing enough insulin to survive. People with T1D must currently monitor their blood sugar levels and administer insulin via shots or an insulin pump, multiple times every day. Even vigilant management does not ward against T1D complications such as heart attack, stroke, blindness, and amputation.

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[1] Soedamah-Muthu, Sabita S., John H. Fuller, Henrietta E. Mulnier, Veena S. Raleigh, Ross A. Lawrenson, and Helen M. Colhoun. “High Risk of Cardiovascular Disease in Patients With Type 1 Diabetes in the U.K.: A cohort study using the General Practice Research Database.” Diabetes Care 29.4 (April 2006): 798-804.