The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation says diabetes kills more people each year than AIDS and breast cancer combined. More than 1 million Americans have this type of diabetes, which makes them insulin-dependent for life.
Adults are not immune from the disease. Juvenile diabetes accounts for about 10 percent of the cases. Millions more have type 2 diabetes, which can be brought on by heredity, age, and weight.
Diabetes can lead to myriad other health problems. For instance, it blinded baseball great Jackie Robinson, who died at 53.
Diabetes also is a leading killer of women. Approximately 8.1 million women, or about 8 percent of the female population of the United States, have the disease, but as many as a third of them may not know it.
Even with insulin, type 1 diabetes usually results in a drastic reduction in quality of life and shortens the average life span by 15 years.
Islet transplantation from the pancreas has emerged as the most promising treatment for restoring normal blood sugar in diabetics. In the procedure, islet cells -- which contain the insulin-producing beta cells that have been destroyed in type 1 diabetes -- are taken from a donor's pancreas, and transferred to a person with the disease.
For more information about the nonprofit research foundation, check out www.jdrf.org
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