The Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes at the University of Colorado Denver, Colo.

— -- My name is George Eisenbarth. I'm executive director of The Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes. We're a center that specialized in the care of children and adults with type 1 diabetes. We care for approximately 3,000 children and 2,000 adults who come to us from countries throughout the world for their care of type 1 diabetes.

So I'm just going to highlight two areas in this brief time. One is, we think the care for type 1 diabetes is entering a third generation, namely with continuous glucose monitoring. It's particularly important for individuals who are having severe problems with hypoglycemia and we hope it's eventually going to lead to smart devices that help control insulin administration.

The other area, that in particular we specialize in, is the prediction and trials for the prevention of type 1 diabetes. And Dr. Hutton at our center has just discovered the fourth major auto-antigen for type 1 diabetes. Approximately one in 200 children who develop diabetes die at onset. In part, they die because the symptoms of the disorder are not recognized and the first healthcare providers don't make the diagnosis at onset. And the symptoms are things like severe thirst and urination, but for children and young adults who are in predictive trials, we essentially always know when the disease is occurring and we can start therapy early. But the major goal are trials for the prevention of diabetes and they are ongoing throughout the United States and in many countries throughout the world. Some of our published findings from SEARCH include that the prevalence of diabetes among youth in this age group in 2001 was about 154,000 nationwide and (there were) higher rates of type 2 diabetes in ethnic minority youth. One of the interesting components of the SEARCH study is that we have representation from the five major racial and ethnic groups in the United States: non-Hispanic whites, African-Americans, Asian and Pacific Islanders, American Indians -- and so we have well-documented rates of prevalence of diabetes as well as incidence of diabetes, which we indicate there are about 18-19,000 youth that are diagnosed with diabetes in the United States each year.