16 February 2012
An article titled "Tucson doc leads bid to help diabetics" in our very own local news source caught my eye because it really relates to some of the information we learned in class last week and hits close to home with a beloved family member. It's exciting to know that University of Arizona Medical Center's very own Dr. David Armstrong and his clinic are leading the way in saving limbs of diabetics. I thought it was really interesting when he said, "A population that was once called pre-diabetic is now included in the (diabetes) population." because there are now more people with slightly lower blood sugar included in the definition. Some of the data presented about diabetes is scary and alarming, but a relief to learn that improvements in blood-sugar control, foot care and diabetes management, along with declines in cardiovascular disease have led to a decrease in the rate of leg and foot amputations among U.S. adults age 40 and older with diagnosed diabetes by 65 percent between 1996 and 2008. Unfortunately, I did not see a reference or link for this study done by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but it is published Jan. 24 in the journal Diabetes Care as stated. If anyone has any thoughts on this article or can add any knowledge, please do!
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I read the article you posted and found it to be rather interesting. Similar to many types of lay articles that over emphasize a "break through" in medical advancement, I found that this article did try to play up the "miracle pill" idea when they included Rosemarie Sales and James Conley's stories about how their respective feet were saved. However, I like how the quotes from Dr. Armstrong brought the article back down to Earth. Such as his comment "Should we congratulate ourselves that aputations went down? Or gird ourselves for a demographic catastrophe." This illusatrated to me that Dr. Armstrong is not one to just toot his own horn in celebration, but is someone who is observant enough to see potential reason for caution. Moreover, for our class purposes I would have liked to see more information regarding the the surgury Dr. Armstrong uses to save a diabetic foot, as well as an explaination regarding the inflammation process that leads diabetics to have these badely infected feet. Lastly, I liked how the article hints that we should be cautious about diabetes statistics in the future. To quote Armstrong "The demoniator has changed" now with people with low blood sugar as well as those considered pre-diabetic now included as "diabetic" we could potentially see skewed statistics in the futrue, and will have to remind ourselves to ask the question of "how did these researchers define diabetic" when looking diabetic research results.
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