The year 1980 doesn't sound so long ago, but in diabetes care, it is another generation. Although many parents of children with diabetes were adults by that time (and we still feel young), we have truly progressed a lifetime in diabetes care since that time.

Insulin Options

Just a short time ago, parents had little choice of how to treat their child's diabetes on a daily basis. For the most part, children were on one or perhaps two shots a day of a peaking, middle-acting insulin like NPH. Some children took regular-acting insulin as well, which had to be administered exactly a half hour before eating and peaked twice in a six-hour period.

The scenes in the 1989 film Steel Magnolias, with Sally Field and Julia Roberts, that captured the world of diabetes, were all too real. With little understanding of how to better use insulin to work with food, lows could come crashing down on a person with diabetes with little warning, as seen in Julia's character just before her wedding day.

Some astute endocrinologists and families figured out that eating more often and at scheduled times, as well as taking shots more frequently, would help “control” diabetes to a point. But for the most part, it was a matter of injecting insulin and crossing your fingers. Those were still the days of “brittle” diabetes, and there was little hope for a better future.

Past Tools

Glucose meters had come to market by then, but they were not covered by insurance, and they were bulky and difficult to use. Most families did not have access to meters because they were too expensive and depended on lab-drawn blood sugar readings and urine dips to figure out what was going on with their child's diabetes.

These tests were random at best and gave families little information on which to base decisions. Checking a person's blood sugar multiple times throughout the day was barely considered, and other than knowing their child was high or low, many families knew little of the moment-to-moment changes in their child's blood sugar levels.

Families, up until the early 1990s, for the most part relied on tablets dropped in urine. Each tablet would produce a color, depending on how much glucose was in the urine. It was a rough tool based on old information, and hard for parents to use to make any real decisions.

Pumps were a rarity, too, although they premiered in 1980. In this decade, the notion of adults, never mind children, on pumps was seldom discussed. It was not until the 1990s and even the start of the 21st century that children on pumps became the norm.