My daughter is 13 years old and was discovered to be diabetic at 8 months. She is now on Mixtard. What is the latest news about:

Islet cell transplantation
Any new medicine instead of insulin to be used for such a patient (Diabetes Type 1)
Is it true that the child can eat all kinds of food and I can simply increase the dose for her without any complication?

You can read a lot about your first question regarding islet transplantation by looking at an article about transplantation at this website.

As to the second question, no treatment except insulin is available so far.

To address the third question, what’s true is that if your daughter has properly educated by her diabetes team on how to self monitoring and self managing her disease (that is, she’s been correctly told on how to adjust her insulin dosage depending on her blood sugar levels fluctuations, what she eats and the amount of exercise she practices) she can eat almost everything and, if doing in the proper way, her metabolic control and body weight doesn’t deteriorate, and she should do fine without any major risk of future complications.

For more information about pancreas transplantation, see:

The Academy for the Advancement of Diabetes Research and Treatment website; especially, look at the places doing pancreas transplants, listed at the International Pancreas Transplant Registry.
Also, see Pancreas Transplantation for Patients With Diabetes Mellitus, a Clinical Practice Recommendation from the American Diabetes Association, and
Pancreas and Kidney Transplantation by Dr. Mark Cattral, at the Canadian Diabetes Association website.
Islet and Pancreatic Transplantation — Autoimmunity and Alloimmunity (Editorial by George S. Eisenbarth, M.D., Ph.D. and Mark Stegall, M.D., Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes. The New England Journal of Medicine — September 19, 1996 — Volume 335, Number 12)

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