Diabetes Care Center at the University of North Carolina, N.C.

— -- Hi. I'm John Buse. I'm a Professor of Medicine and Director of the Diabetes Care Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. We have about a hundred faculty members here involved in various aspects of diabetes research. It ranges from basic science, to clinical research, to, really, population-based research, and I wanted to tell you about three of those kinds of programs.

One that aims to look at how we can affect the care of diabetes in the entire community will train laypeople -- people without diabetes or any medical background -- to help patients with diabetes do a better job with their diet, exercise more regularly, monitor their blood sugar, basically to do the things they need to do to improve their diabetes control, because that's something we can accomplish in communities.

A second study aims to prevent the development of diabetes in children. It's called STOP-T2D, and it's funded by the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases, and it aims to improve the environment in schools to try and reduce the risk of obesity and the development of diabetes by increasing the amount of physical activity that kids get in P.E., to improve the nutrition, basically, in school lunches and to improve knowledge about diabetes and diabetes risk factors and how to manage diet and exercise.

And a third study that we're doing is called ACCORD. It's trying to establish what the appropriate targets are for blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol for the future in the management of type 2 diabetes, and, basically, it's randomizing people to very intensive therapy of diabetes versus standard care, very intensive therapy for blood pressure versus standard care, and very intensive therapy for cholesterol. And the answers that we get in 2009 will tell us how aggressively we should manage diabetes in the future.