glucose

As recently as the 1950s, one in three people diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes died within 25 years of diagnosis. People in the '50s had to monitor their glucose levels via urine testing and inject themselves with animal-derived insulin.

How far we've come. Today, researchers are working to develop an artificial pancreas for people with Type 1 diabetes that works with a smartphone or tablet to both monitors blood glucose levels and disperses insulin 24/7.

The goal, they say, is to reduce complications and improve the life expectancy of the millions of people with the metabolic disease -- because even though only 7 percent of them now die within 25 years of diagnosis, this rate is still far above general population mortality.… Read more

For diabetics who have to constantly manage their blood-sugar levels, insulin works. The problem is, many people with Type 1 diabetes have to prick their fingers multiple times a day to monitor their levels, and inject themselves with insulin when those levels are too high. And they don't always administer the right amount at the right time.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Children's Hospital hope to automate insulin delivery with a novel nanotech approach that involves injecting a gel that detects blood-sugar levels and secretes insulin when needed -- with a single injection doing do the trick for as many as 10 days.… Read more

Ever thought a smartphone could detect what was in your urine? Well, now it can. A new iPhone app, developed by MIT entrepreneur Myshkin Ingawale and unveiled at the TED conference this week, lets people take urine samples with their mobile device.

Obviously, pee and electronics don't mix, so this app instead uses the smartphone's camera to determine what's in urine. Dubbed Uchek, the app involves the user peeing into a cup, putting a color-coded urinalysis strip into the cup, taking of photo of the results, and then letting the app work its magic.… Read more

Within a couple years, a single exhale may tell us more about our personal health than merely the current state of our oral hygiene -- and without relying on dogs to sniff out our problems.

The answer lies in a device called the Single Breath Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer. Back in 2010, Stony Brook University researcher Perena Gouma began testing an earlier iteration in preclinical trials; for use with diabetes patients; now she has developed a sensor that might enable the detection of a range of diseases in a single exhale.

The sensor, which lives in a device about half the … Read more

Glucose levels are 100 times more concentrated in blood than in saliva, which is why in spite of many efforts to use saliva, diabetics are still pricking themselves to get accurate glucose readings.

But now, harnessing the power of nanotechnology, engineers at Brown University say they've designed a biochip that can measure glucose levels in saliva almost as accurately as current devices can measure levels in blood.

To do this, the engineers etched a complicated array of thousands of plasmonic interferometers (no, this is not an episode of Farscape) onto a fingernail-size biochip. This means they were essentially using … Read more

Patches of tiny needles have already been shown to effectively deliver medications painlessly, and without a bloody mess. Now the tiny needles could also be used to monitor body chemistry in real time.

The new tech, developed by a team of biomedical engineers out of North Carolina State University, the University of California at San Diego, and Sandia National Laboratories, employs electrochemical sensors in the hollow channels of microneedles to detect certain molecules. The researchers reported their findings in the chemistry journal Talanta.

Current body chemistry monitoring involves taking samples, often before or after an event. Wearable micro-sensors, on the … Read more

All right, people, I hate to be the bearer of such grave news, but resolution season is almost upon us. If you're wondering how to make 2012 the year you finally shed those extra pounds, start choosing the apple over the fries, floss every day, etc., read on.

As of late last night, there's an app for all that--and it's free. Called Macaw, the app for iPhone and Android phones could just be the health and fitness app game changer.

Developed by U.S. Preventive Medicine alongside wireless health network provider Qualcomm Life, design firm Fjord (… Read more

With some 26 million Americans living with diabetes (8.3 percent of the U.S. population), according to the American Diabetes Association, a lot of research is going into how to make blood glucose monitoring more effective and affordable.

Researchers at Arizona State University and the Mayo Clinic are partnering up to develop a monitor that enables people to dab their tear ducts instead of prick their fingers--which could be a big deal for those who currently draw blood as many as a dozen times a day to monitor their blood glucose levels.

"The problem with current self-monitoring blood glucose technologies is not so much the sensor, it's the painful finger prick," Jeffrey LaBelle, a bioengineer and chief designer, said in a news release. "This new technology might encourage patients to check their blood sugars more often, which could lead to better control of their diabetes by a simple touch to the eye."

The team reported on the first stage of their research on the sensor in Diabetes Science and Technology in March 2010, and quickly sparked interest from Arizona-based nonprofit BioAccel, which works to speed up the process of bringing biomedical technologies to the marketplace.

Using funding from BioAccel, the team is now compiling data to apply for human clinical trials of the device, but major challenges remain, including accuracy, efficiency, speed of performing the test, reproducible results, and of course making sure the test sample does not evaporate before it can be read.… Read more

A new study has found that prolonged use of a cell phone increases brain activity but failed to determine whether such use can lead to health problems.

The study, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, recruited 47 people in good health to document the effects of cell phone use on the brain. Conducted in 2009 by researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, the study was created to see whether the electromagnetic fields emitted by cell phones affect the brain's glucose metabolism, considered a marker for brain activity.

Cell phones were placed next … Read more