The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is notifying health care professionals and patients that Tyco Healthcare Group LP (Covidien) is recalling one lot of ReliOn sterile, single-use, disposable, hypodermic syringes with permanently affixed hypodermic needles due to possible mislabeling.

A new study led by researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center has found that women with type 1 diabetes who reported taking less insulin than prescribed had a three-fold increased risk of death and higher rates of disease complications than those who did not skip needed insulin shots. The new research appears in the March issue of Diabetes Care.

Due to the success of the first three years of the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the American College of Physicians Foundation (ACPF) Diabetes Initiative, the program has received additional funding from Novo Nordisk Inc. to continue the initiative for an additional two years through December 2009.

Many patients with diabetes say that the inconvenience and discomfort of constant therapeutic vigilance, particularly multiple daily insulin injections, has as much impact on their quality of life as the burden of intermediate complications, researchers from the University of Chicago report in the October 2007 issue of Diabetes Care.

Despite decades of advances in diabetes care, African Americans and Latinos are still far less likely than whites to have their blood sugar under control, even with the help of medications, a new nationally representative study finds. That puts them at a much higher risk of blindness, heart attack, kidney failure, foot amputation and other long-term diabetes complications.

Researchers at the University of Warwick’s Warwick Medical School have uncovered a process that locks the body’s metabolism in a diabetic state after only relatively limited exposure to high glucose levels.

A symposium, sponsored by the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) in collaboration with the American Diabetes Association, the American Association of Diabetes Educators, Joslin Diabetes Center and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing identified barriers to, and strategies for, more effective diabetes self management and reaffirmed the nurse's critical role to facilitate better patient self care. These results are published in a special supplement to the June issue of AJN.

Research published in PLoS Medicine examines the impact of the UK government's new contract with general practitioners (family doctors) on the care of people with diabetes. The research, conducted in Wandsworth in London, found that improvements had occurred, but black people of Caribbean origin were not benefiting to the extent of other ethnic groups.

Spending money to improve diabetes care at federally qualified community health centers is a sound investment, according to one of the first studies to examine the clinical and economic impact of quality improvement on diabetes care.

Living Cell Technologies Limited (ASX: LCT) today announced it has published evidence outlining the survival and identification of live porcine islet cells and insulin production in a human patient 10 years after receiving a pig islet cell transplant.