‘Nobody chooses to have diabetes’: Alberta professor pushes for awareness

A major milestone, the 100 anniversary of insulin, provides the perfect platform to spread more awareness about an incurable, but controllable disease, diabetes.

November is National Diabetes Awareness Month, and a local professor provides the perfect launch point, answering the question for those who don’t know, what is diabetes?

“Diabetes is a condition when someone cannot process the energy in food properly, leading to high sugars in the bloodstream, also known as blood sugar,” said Dr. Rose Yeung, an associate professor at the University of Alberta in the division of endocrinology and metabolism.

“Blood sugar has to be carefully regulated to ensure that the body works properly. Too much blood sugar can damage organs blood vessels and nerves.”

Bryanne Bulgin thinks back to being in hospital at the age of nine when she learned she is a Type 1 diabetic.

“I was in school and like due to technologies and stuff back then, like back in the 90s I never checked my blood sugar during the days at all or anything,” she recalled.

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“When going to Phys Ed. class like my teachers knew that I would have to have an additional carb prior to Phys Ed. class so my blood sugar didn’t go down and crash.”

Although Bulgin admits the test results didn’t fully sink in until she was closer to 13 years old and was learning how to manage her diabetes on her own.

Yeung explains, there are a number of different types of diabetes, but in Canada Type 1, the one Bulgin suffers from, accounts for five to 10 per cent of cases, while Type 2 accounts for the other 85 to 95 per cent.

“(It’s) an auto-immune condition, which means that the body attacks the pancreas which is the organ producing insulin,” she said.

“We don’t exactly know why that happens, it’s thought that there are some genetic factors, some environmental factors that contribute to it. People with Type 1 diabetes cannot produce enough insulin to manage their blood sugars properly.”

Bulgin wonders about the validity of genetic factors though, being that no one in her family is diabetic.

“When I was diagnosed I was nine and I was extremely underweight, but obviously I was sick,” she said.

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“So it’s not just the elderly, it’s not just the obese. It’s not, I’ve eaten too much sugar, it’s the fact that it’s an issue with my body, my body has rejected my pancreas and it just doesn’t work anymore.”

What has improved her life though is wearing a continuous glucose monitoring system, instead of having to poke her finger.

“If people can’t properly manage their diabetes they can end up with devastating complications, like vision loss, like kidney failure requiring dialysis, like heart attacks and strokes,” said Yeung.

“These things can be preventable with adequate action and support early on and the continuous glucose monitors, especially for people on insulin, is the way to help them prevent these devastating complications, long term.”

Yeung says the discovery of insulin has saved millions of lives around the world.

“Although we now have the medications and the technology to save many lives and improve the quality of many lives, we still have a lot of work to make sure that those treatments are fairly and equally accessible by all Canadians,” she said.

“Nobody chooses to have diabetes. I encourage people to check out the Diabetes Canada website to learn more about what’s going on and to support people with diabetes in the community.”