CWD News

Having options for managing diabetes is so important because people are different and have different needs. This is also important for children who have diabetes, some of whom do not want to wear an insulin pump. What’s great is that there are more options than just pens or syringes, there are also smart pens. What exactly is a smart pen? It’s a device that allows you to track when the last injection was taken from the pen which helps people know how much active insulin is still circulating. This is HUGE because it can help prevent low blood sugars related […]

At CWD, we encourage families who have a child with diabetes to have honest conversations with the siblings of the child with diabetes about their experiences.  We have learned through the many families who attend the Friends for Life conferences, and through our own personal experiences, that siblings have their own challenges with diabetes in the family. It was not until I was a young adult that I truly realized the impact of my own diabetes on my siblings. We joked about how they were never allowed to have juice boxes and how I would use diabetes as an excuse […]

There have been many big questions about how the Sars-CoV-2 virus relates to diabetes, especially for our CWD community. Now that we are 18 months into the pandemic, we have more answers to help you navigate the COVID-19 era. Q: Are adults with type 1 diabetes at an increased risk for severe illness if they contract the Sars-CoV-2 virus? A: It is true that adults with type 1 diabetes are at an increased risk for severe illness, hospitalization, and mortality while in the hospital.1 One of the challenges is that as a person with diabetes (PWD), experiencing nausea and vomiting […]

Closed loop insulin delivery systems are becoming more accessible to people living with diabetes (PWD). They come in different forms, but have a few key pieces in common: an insulin delivery method (usually a pump), a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), and a software algorithm that uses the data from the CGM to drive insulin delivery. All closed loop systems have the goal of improving health outcomes for people with diabetes, including the improvement of quality of life. Diabetes is a constant day-to-day burden that requires a lot of time and energy to manage. Having a system that drives itself with […]

If you wear an insulin pump, you were probably told, “When in doubt, change it out.” That means that if your blood sugar is high for a seemingly inexplicable reason, it’s likely the infusion set not working properly. Some researchers are trying to create infusion sets that last longer in the body, and others are working on algorithms to detect infusion set problems earlier. As discussed in this article from the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, ways to identify infusion set failures automatically have been investigated, but not tested on real data.1 The authors acknowledge the challenges in creating […]