SEATTLE, Wash. — November is Diabetes Awareness Month, and medical professionals from across Puget Sound got together for a conference on the state of disease in our area.
The meeting came on the heels of several major breakthroughs in the fight against it.
KIRO 7′s Ranji Sinha looks at those developments in this week’s Healthier Together.
Shirline Wilson is on the Executive Leadership Team with the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and lives in Washington. She’s one of thousands dealing with disease.
“I am a person who has lived with type 2 diabetes,” she told KIRO 7. “My diagnosis was five years ago.”
Wilson says for ten years, she lived with diabetes without ever knowing it.
Her story and others were shared at the 2024 State of Diabetes: Puget Sound conference at the University of Washington this month. Wilson says her case is like many others, where people miss the warning signs.
“Monitoring your sugars, your glucose your stress levels things like that are often things people are not told about,” Wilson said.
The ADA estimates 536,600 adults in Washington – that’s 8.7% of the adult population—have been diagnosed with diabetes; and each year, an estimated 36,400 WA adults are diagnosed with the condition.
CBS News recently profiled a treatment for type 1 diabetes. It’s a procedure that could mean diabetics wouldn’t have to inject themselves with insulin. It’s called Islet cell transplantation.
The pancreas has cells that help digest food and manage insulin levels called islet cells; those cells are taken from an organ donor and are put into a patient. Then they start producing insulin.
Creating islet cells from stem cells is also showing promise. Several studies found diabetes patients who received stem cells saw those turn into islet cells that made insulin. Both treatments are in the relatively early stages of research but hold promise for treatment and a possible cure for diabetes.
Dr. Drew Oliveira is the Executive Director of the Washington Health Alliance and attended this month’s conference. He says those therapies do have a role to play in tackling diabetes.
“I think that’s fantastic for certain types of diabetes so that people that have lost insulin,” he told KIRO 7. “The type 1s, that’s where we’re going to see some of this really come up.”
Dr. Oliveira believes weight loss drugs are helping, and soon devices could be implanted to regulate the release of insulin, which would limit the need for repeated injections.
“You don’t really have to think about it anymore,” Dr. Olivera said. “I think it’s fascinating.”
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