April 18, 2001
Insulin Pumps
Question from Dallas, Texas, USA:
My seven year old daughter was diagnosed with type�1 diabetes at the age of three, and I am very interested in putting her on a pump, but her doctor will not do it because these devices weren’t originally designed for little kids, and there are no published safety and efficacy data on the use of the pump in pre-adolescents. In particular, there are no large controlled trials, where someone took a bunch of kids who wanted to be on the pump, then put half of those kids on the pump for a few years in a randomly-assigned way, and looked to see what happened to control and complication rates. Do you know of any trials where this has taken place? If this has not been done yet, when it does happen? Will it appear on this website?
Answer:
There are no randomized trials of pump use in kids as you have described. However, the groups from Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, Yale University in New Haven and the Barbara Davis Center in Denver have all written about clinical pump trials with younger patients with great success.
It is unlikely that there will be such controlled randomized clinical trials for several years because they are so difficult to do and so expensive. You should talk to your daughter’s diabetes team in some more detail and perhaps consider having them talk to some other pediatric diabetes folks around the US and Canada and other parts of the world who have had experience with young patients using insulin pumps successfully.
SB
