Dr Yehuda Handelsman on How Insulin Therapy Advances Can Boost Patients' Quality of Life

With new technologies that allow insulin to be delivered much more easily and at a targeted speed, diabetes treatment is less likely to interfere with patients’ lives, explained Yehuda Handelsman, MD, FACP, FACE, FNLA, medical director and principal investigator at the Metabolic Institute of America.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How can new and improved insulin therapies improve treatment and satisfaction for patients with diabetes?

By having new technologies that make the delivery of insulin so much easier and closer to mimicking how the body’s insulin works. Having new insulin that we can target to work much slower with low peak, or much faster-acting and faster out of the body, we actually improve their efficacy, and more importantly improve the safety, reducing hypoglycemia. So the patient all of a sudden is able to manage glucose and insulin in almost a painless way. Good control, unless hypoglycemia, which again as I mentioned before makes it a fearful situation for them to have hypoglycemia.

So being assured that it is so much simpler, they will be more happy, they will be more satisfied, and I will tell you, one of the newer insulins we have is so long-acting and it’s so stable that we can give it at any time, and if the patients forget it, the patients have up to a day and a half, two days to take it. So when patients even fly across the globe, it doesn’t matter anymore, so it becomes so much easier for patients to use it and to still have it efficacious we need it to.