THE EUROPEAN Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) Annual Meeting is the largest international annual conference on diabetes research worldwide. Founded in 1965,

‘The Ominous Quartet’ represents four glycaemic disorders at the centre of cardiovascular diseases in diabetes, including ambient…

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), defined as hyperglycaemia during pregnancy, is associated with an increased future offspring risk of insulin resistance and obesity later in life

More than two decades ago, during the 3-year course as a post-graduate trainee of internal medicine and working in the largest medical college of Asia, that too under a renowned diabetologist, I was exposed to handling an extremely busy diabetes clinic catering several hundred patients a day, with a limited backup supporting staff. I think this was the trigger for my keen interest in pursuing post-doctoral course in diabetes and endocrinology. Even during my undergraduate days, there was a notion that if you do not fully know how to treat diabetes and tuberculosis in India, you have not learnt anything about internal medicine. The field of diabetology was set to hold a great promise since a lot was left to be learnt about the complex pathophysiology including the management of Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).

Diabetes is predicted to affect 5.5 million individuals by 2030 in the UK alone. There is no known cure for this increasingly common condition and current treatment includes medication, weight loss surgery, and lifestyle changes.

Females with Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) are at increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes.1 Compared to the general population, there is a higher prevalence of congenital malformations, caesarean delivery, fetal macrosomia, large for gestational age (LGA) infants, pre-eclampsia, preterm delivery, and neonatal mortality.2-4

The most exciting changes have actually been to the changes in format. The EASD this year is, again, a virtual meeting only. There’s a couple of interesting changes in format. First of all, we are starting not at 8 a.m. in the morning, Central European Summer Time, but 10 a.m.; and it goes on until 5:30 p.m. or 6 p.m. This is so that people in different time zones don’t have to get up at 3 in the morning or stay up until 3 at night at the end of each day.

I have always been interested in physiology and how the body works, and, during my PhD, I had the opportunity to work with models of glucose dysregulation. Many of us take the ability to control our blood glucose within a ‘healthy euglycaemic’ range for granted. It is only when things go wrong that we appreciate how complex this process is. My recent work has focused on Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), where individuals cannot produce their own insulin and rely on insulin replacement therapy.

In my previous role, I worked in the Pharma and was in the industry for about 20 years, but I felt that by working in medical affairs, I was also working closely with people. By with people, I mean people with diabetes first of all, and also with disease experts. So, in a role such as this, I would say that it involves working both for the company, with commercial interests, and for the real world, which is the world of patients and physicians. Being a bit in between, testing what disease experts and patients think about your solutions, and bringing that back internally to the company was really interesting for me.