Now that the US market is suspiciously saturated with human insulin - and many of us diagnosed within the last 10 years did not have a shot at trying porcine insulin - I'd like to set the record straight. When the pharmaceutical companies cherry pick the studies they wish to use for their gain, and not so much for your enhanced quality of life - they must've lost this study.

Please read the entire study (if you have access to it in a local library) but what grabbed my undivided attention was the sentence that says: it was observed that the action of porcine insulin was associated with... a striking increase of prolactinaemia, in relation to semisynthetic human insulin.

Okay -- so as I look deeper into the function of prolactin -- aside from some definite dopamine enhancing activities (if you know what I mean) :::wink wink::: -- it is responsible for the formation of myelin coatings on axons in the central nervous system. This is a certifiable problem that results in diabetic neuropathy and the related side effects (numbness, nerve dysfunction, i.e, ED).

Ex-queeze me? Does this say that human synthetic insulin may be a cock blocking drug?

Sorry for the blunt delivery -- but this is the truth. Why doesn't human synthetic insulin have this listed as a side effect? My guess is: if you had a choice of human synthetic insulin versus highly purified porcine insulin -- and you knew the side effects of human synthetic might take a toll on the health of your sex life -- you might be praying to the porcine gods.

Shame on the companies who knew about this study and kept it undercover so you couldn't...

Fair and balanced, just like Fox News -- I want to let everyone know that the "Matt P" I spoke to, at the ADA responded to my blog about the aforementioned conversation. His response is #17 and it is sincere and genuine -- certifiable in my book. Again, let me reiterate that the nature of my call to the ADA was to ask for their assistance in getting a big pharmaceutical company to sponsor C-peptide FDA trials here in the US. Thanks again to Matt. He really is doing all he can, but there seems to be a suspicious roadblock holding up the research here in the US. Any guesses? Without further adieu, here's Matt:

I hope people will take time to read my reply to yesterday's post about ADA and c-peptide. I work for ADA, and I was the "Matt P" who talked to Allie a week or two ago.

I certainly wouldn't\'t discourage you from calling our 800-DIABETES number, but I think you should consider why we have an 800 number and what the staff of our Call Center are trained to do. Their primary goal is to help people with basic questions about taking care of diabetes. They have very little information about what research is going on in diabetes, because that information does not yet have any relevance for the vast majority of people who need the help of our Call Center. Callers are primarily concerned about nutrition, help with paying for medications, and information about complications. The staff does try to take care of callers who want to give guidance to ADA on things like research and legislative priorities, but their primary focus is on providing immediate, direct advice about diabetes management to people who can't get it any other way.

Again, please read my other reply. Guys, diabetes is awful, everyone who works at ADA thinks so and of course so do all of you. We would all sincerely like to see effective treatments come into our hands immediately, but I'm afraid that there is almost nothing ADA can do to change the basic nature of the research process or the drug approval process. Despite recent promising research results regarding c-peptide, there's no way the FDA would approve it as a therapy for diabetes complications until more research is done to precisely define what it does and how well and how safely it does it.

Could industry do more? Probably, although we don't know exactly what they\'re doing now---please see my other post. We live in free society where people and companies don't always have to tell you what they're doing. If you want my pledge to talk to people at Lilly and Novo about the potential promise of c-peptide, you have it.

By all means, call them yourself. I'm afraid our Call Center staff, who do an incredible job with handling a huge number of calls from a lot of desperate people, aren't going to be able to do much to address an issue that is still at the research stage.

Sincerely,

Matt