Dr Craig Jefferies is a Paediatric Endocrinologist, and the Director of Diabetes at Auckland Starship Hospital. I was looking forward to hearing him speak as his topic was listed as ‘latest technology and treatments’, which anyone who reads this blog will know I’m a fan of. To be honest, he didn’t reveal anything neeeew-new: in fact if you’ve been reading this blog or keeping an eye on overseas trends in general, you would have been nodding along, more than furiously taking notes for researching later. Nonetheless, he was a great speaker, and had us all paying full attention for the whole time he spoke. Some of the nuggets I picked up from his talk:

• The kids with diabetes coming through Starship these days are 90% Type 1, 10% Type 2.
• Inhaled insulin looked like it was going to be a huge breakthrough, it was around for about 12 months then tapered off: apparently it was identified that it raised the risk of lung cancer.
• He thinks pumps are good: however they are not the silver bullet for good diabetes control – they suit about 25% of the population: those who are highly motivated.
• He told us a story after this about a three year old girl who totally mangled an insulin pump in one night…. she first of all nibbled all the buttons off it, then shoved it down her nappies and weed on it (presumably not helped by the fact that her pump would have stopped delivering insulin, thus her BGs would have been very high and she would have needed to go to the loo).
• We all laughed when he told us about the ‘new technology’ angle of insulin pumps getting Dads to come into the hospital for the first time: they won’t have been seen in clinic for years, then when an insulin pump comes on the scene, all of a sudden Dad’s interested in the gadgetry and all the functions available!
• He feels like possibly the best use for ‘closed loop’ technology (whereby a pump and a continuous glucose monitoring system work in tandem like an artificial pancreas) would be overnight, when a patient is asleep. The reason being that when you’re asleep, you’re less likely to do anything unpredictable like take off for a run, get stressed or eat something you weren’t planning on. He figures that if we could sort out the population for the eight hours they’re asleep, it would have cumulative benefits on overall control [I concur with this: given that my overnights were the worst controlled part of my day and once I managed to sort them out I got a much better HbA1c level]
• He showed a lot of graphs as to the different regions in NZ and their overall control figures. Auckland was doing the best (not surprisingly given the facilities we are blessed with here).