Word: insulin
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...disease strikes some 1.5 million Americans, usually between infancy and age 40. Yet unlike the other major form of diabetes, which afflicts some 8.5 million older Americans, it can never be controlled by diet alone. Juvenile-onset diabetes requires daily injections of insulin, the hormone used by the body to help burn sugar. But even with life-giving insulin therapy, there may be severe complications, including blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks and stroke. Partly because insulin keeps people alive long enough to bear children who may inherit the disease, the prevalence of diabetes has been increasing for the past several...
Artificial pancreas. Responding to shifting levels of sugar in the blood, the pancreas constantly adjusts its secretion of insulin, delivering more during meals, when larger quantities are needed, less during exercise or sleep. Daily insulin injections can correct a deficiency, but are not the whole answer: often the insulin level is above or below what it should be, and the blood's sugar fluctuates wildly, probably aggravating the diabetic's other problems...
Yale's Philip Felig and other doctors are now helping nature by fitting juvenile diabetics with miniature battery-powered pumps that continuously trickle insulin into their bodies. Weighing barely a pound, the artificial pancreases are worn on the belt or carried in a shoulder...
...pumps tap a 24-hr, insulin supply, feeding it at a slow, steady rate via a thin tube that ends in a needle inserted under the skin of the abdomen or thigh. Before meals, patients can override the pre-set instructions and briefly step up the dosage by pressing a button. One incidental benefit, reports Felig: blood fats, including cholesterol, seem to return to normal during treatment...
...admit that private funding is used for research, although Geoffrey P. Pollitt, director of the Bio Labs, said yesterday that such funding is "unusual." University records show only three instances of private funding for research, one from UpJohn Corporation, one from Biogen, who is helping to pay for the insulin experiments of Walter F. Gilbert '53, American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology, and one from the Campbell Soup Corporation, which sponsored mushroom research earlier this decade...