Diabetes treatment

But people with Type 1 diabetes get old too – so where does that leave them for the rest of their lives?

Many private insurance plans also do not cover CGM. I work full-time as a University professor and CGM is not covered by our plan. Fortunately, I am lucky enough to be able to afford the out-of-pocket costs.

Without coverage CGM simply costs too much for most Canadians with Type 1 diabetes.

Right now, the Yukon is the only place in Canada that gets the coverage right. They cover CGM for everyone with Type 1 diabetes, and I bet they will be rewarded for this with fewer emergency room visits, lower longterm costs related to Type 1 diabetes care, and happier, healthier and more productive people with Type 1 diabetes and their families.

The federal government’s long promised pharmacare plan has so far amounted to words, words and more words, no action – and no guarantee CGM will be included should it ever materialize.

In the meantime, the other jurisdictions in Canada need to follow Yukon’s lead. If the provinces and territories all worked together, the costs for CGM would come down and everyone in Canada would benefit. ■ H

Dylan MacKay is person who lives with Type 1 diabetes and an Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Chronic Disease in the Department of Food and Human Nutritional Sciences and the Department of Internal Medicine Section Endocrinology at the University of Manitoba.

“We would have loved to do this analysis on a huge data set,” said Cameron Meaney, a PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics and the study’s lead researcher. “Based on the nature of the illness, however, that’s very challenging because there isn’t a long life expectancy, and people tend to start treatment. That’s why the opportunity to compare five untreated tumours was so rare – and valuable.”

Now that the scientists have a good model of how GBM grows untreated, their next step is to expand the model to include the effect of treatment on the tumours. Then the data set would increase from a handful of MRIs to thousands.

Meaney emphasizes that access to MRI data – and partnership between mathematicians and clinicians – can have huge impacts on patients going forward.

“The integration of quantitative analysis into healthcare is the future,” Meaney said.

The study, Deep Learning Characterization of Brain Tumours With Diffusion Weighted Imaging, co-authored by Meaney, Sunit Das, Errol Colak, and Mohammad Kohandel, appears in the Journal of Theoretical Biology ■ H