Scientists at London have used an “Artificial Pancreas” system of pumps and monitors to improve blood sugar control in diabetes patients in the first study to show the new device works better than conventional treatment.

Researchers from Britain’s Cambridge University tested the device on 17 children with type 1 diabetes during a series of nights in hospital and found it kept their blood sugar levels within the “normal” range 60 per cent of the time.

HOW IT WORKS?
The new system, which involves patients wearing a matchbox-sized monitor and a similar-sized pump with a tube to deliver insulin into the body, also halved the amount of time blood sugar dropped to worrying or dangerous levels, they said.

Medical device makers have been working for years to develop a so-called artificial pancreas to deliver insulin to patients with type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease in which the body destroys its own ability to make insulin.

The bodies of type 1 diabetes sufferers become unable to properly break down sugar and if untreated, blood vessels and nerves are destroyed, organs fail and patients die.

“These devices could transform the management of type 1 diabetes, but it is likely to be a gradual process,” Roman Hovorka of Cambridge, who led the research, said in a telephone interview.

He said the results were “an important stepping stone” towards bringing an artificial pancreas to the commercial market, but predicted several years yet of refinement before it could be used day and night by patients.

“It’s a bit like with mobile phones. When we started, the technology wasn’t very good and the functionality was limited, and it took a number of generations to move to the device that we have now. I see the same thing with this system.”

24-HOUR CHECKS

The goal is to create a device that can check patients’ blood day and night.

The Cambridge study found their device performed better than a conventional pump, which delivers insulin at pre-set rates and which kept blood sugar levels around normal for 40 per cent of the time compared with 60 per cent for the artificial pancreas.

Hovorka said the findings were particularly encouraging because the study included nights when the children went to bed after eating a large evening meal or having done exercise — both of which can affect blood sugar levels.

The team working on this research passed through a weeklong “wash-out” process. In this process they used fragrance-free shampoos and soaps during washings and baths to avoid any type of smell from themselves during working. They wore T-shirts provided by the researchers to eliminate smells emitted from external means.

The researchers then took odor samples by touching a funnel with an absorbent fiber on the individual’s skin for half an hour. The remaining compounds on the skin were collected by washing it with an alcohol. Two other compounds are also found. We found two chemicals in particular that were significantly different when you compared a cancer patient with a healthy sub solution to collect compounds sitting on the surface. Both of them were collected from the body of healthy volunteers. One of them was abundantly found whereas other one was present in low concentration on the tumors in the cancer patients. The whole research work was disclosed at the American Chemical Society meeting held in Philadelphia.

The research scientists don’t know what biochemical pathway is producing these two compounds and they also don’t know what makes the change in their concentration. Paul Nghiem who is dermatologist of the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, is not working with the research team but he says that there are chances that some physical or chemical reasons may be present behind these distinctive patterns of odors.

This research work is being considered as a breakthrough in the field of curing cancer. Some more research work is need; hopefully scientists would also do more towards that direction.

Skin-cancer tumors emit a specific odor that could help in early diagnosis of disease. People who are having tendency of bearing skin cancer must pass themselves through different examination tests and biopsies of suspicious moles so that tissues having disease could be detected and cured at an early stage of the disease. This new discovery gives a new way which is a quicker method to detect the disease without puncturing the skin or entering a body cavity. Researchers have found a characteristic odor coming out of the skin-cancer tumors.

Statistics show that more than a million skin cancer patients are diagnosed each year in America. Basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas are the common cancer types. But these types of cancer diseases are not fatal and not spread very much. Five percent of this whole statistics includes disease of Melanoma; it is a skin-cancer which is the fatal type and reported as the majority of skin-cancer deaths.

For a long time scientists believed that tumors give off a unique smell. Scientists also researched on dog’s smelling sense and found that they have ability to sniff out melanomas and other cancer diseases. It was practically proven by Armand Cognetta, who is a dermatologist in Tallahassee, FL. He trained a dog to smell melanoma; the dog could find melanoma samples hidden in a room and also detect them on the cancer patients.

Michelle Gallagher is a senior scientist at Rohm & Haas. So Gallagher and her advisor, Monell chemist George Preti, took the step to identify the odor markers. Gallagher and Preti joined 11 more people with them with basal cell carcinoma for this research work. All of them are working at the University of Pennsylvania with dermatologists.

Adjustable beds are usually used in hospitals to serve patients to change their positions. They help them in rising with least effort and help. Now Charles Filipi who is a surgeon at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska worked to make it more advance. He strived to take them a step further, literally.

He says that many weighty patients are asked to take exercise daily. This exercise is a part of their treatment. But a lot of staff is required to make them into a standing position to get started. And additionally finding a treadmill for them to take them into exercise can also be time taking activity.

For that, Filipi proposes fixing the treadmill into the hospital bed. When not being used the treadmill goes into a vertical position at the end of the bed (the image illustrates it).
When the patient desires to make an exercise, the bed tardily moves into the right angle position. It establishes the treadmill onto the ground in a ready position. It means a patient can always use the treadmill easily without anybody’s assistance.