Many diabetics are overweight — doctor

Press, 2 October 1979, Page 25

Many diabetics are overweight — doctor

At least half of the people suffering from diabetes in New Zealand are overweight, according to Professor D. W. Beaven, the physician, in charge of the diabetes service for the North Canterbury Hospital Board. The body produced 25 to 30 units of insulin a day: if a person was 30 per cent above his ideal body weight he needed to make twice as much insulin, said Professor Beaven, who recently went to an international conference on diabetes in Vienna.

Professor J. Birk-Beck, of the nutrition department at Otago University had said that half of all

New Zealanders were overweight enough to damage their health and that one-third were grossly overweight. Many New Zealanders were so overweight that they looked deformed compared with say, the Indonesians. Professor Beaven said the week-lohg Vienna conference had been attended by more than 4000 people involved with administering diabetes services or suffering from the illness themselves. Diabetes was now recognised as not one or two disorders affecting the pancreas gland, which produces insulin, but more than a dozen disorders.

There were more than 120 million diabetics in the world.

The meeting had heard that 200 Koreans and 600 South Americans had recently developed acute diabetes through coming into contact with rat posions.

Professor H. Goodman, a Californian molecular biologist, had told the meeting of his breakthrough in discovering how insulin was manufactured inside the cell. He had been able to identify the molecular sequence of R.N.A. and discover how each amino acid formed in the right order to make insulin.

He had been working cm

gene splicing, which involved taking a bacterium from the bowel, splitting it and putting in R.N.A. which would then code for human insulin instead of producing more bacteria.

The work of Professor Goodman was a breakthrough because no bacteria would be grown in a tank and made into human insulin. About a quarter of the world”s diabetics would benefit from gene splicing.

Insulin ’ was extracted from a pig’s pancreas but it would probably be made cheaply like penicillin in the next 10 years. The new insulin would keep many poor diabetics alive. Most diabetics in In-

donesia, for example, died at present because they could not aford to buy insulin.

Another important development was in in-sulin-infusion systems. Insulin was usually injected into patients twice a day and was released continuously into the blood stream. The human pancreas released insulin according to the blood-sugar level, which could be allowed to vary only slightly from the normal balance. Injected insulin could not take into account the amount of sugar in the blood whereas the pancreas released short bursts after food had been eaten.

Now an insulin-infusion system the size of a large wristwatch had been developed. It could be fixed to various parts of the body with a small needle under the skin which pumpec insulin in all day.

It had a button which the patient could push when he had eaten to give a short burst of insulin quickly. Systems had been devised with electronic sensors to calculate the level of blood sugar but these had not been successful: they could not be kept under the skin long enough because scar tissue grew around them.