Johns Hopkins Medicine, Md.

— -- Johns Hopkins Diabetes CenterJohns Hopkins is a big place of course, and we have a lot of work going on in diabetes. We have studies of the cause of eye disease, we have biochemistry studies into the effects of insulin on a cell, we have epidemiologic studies of the causes of obesity and the genetics of diabetes. So there's a lot going on, but we also have a diabetes center, the Johns Hopkins Diabetes Center, and there we have particularly patient education programs. We have a nurse educator and a nurse practitioner, both of whom are excellent at working one-on-one, and both of them run a group program that teaches people about diabetes because we think it's so essential to know about diabetes.

Also at the center we've been involved in some research studies. We have done, for example, at the high-tech end of diabetes, work with an implanted insulin pump, which is actually surgically implanted under the skin, and is controlled from the outside. We've had very good experience with controlling the diabetes by completely telemetry, using the external communicator to control the insulin delivery and thereby control the diabetes.

Another, other end of the technology spectrum say is the diabetes prevention program, which we have been a part of; that has taken people who were at very high risk for diabetes, people who were at high risk for type 2 diabetes, and working on ways to prevent that diabetes from developing, and we have shown, along with a group of some 25 centers around the country, that lifestyle changes, that losing weight, that exercise, and that the medication metformin can actually prevent the progression of pre-diabetes into diabetes. So that's been a very important national study that we've been a part of.