Insulin for diabetes: 100 years of therapy

On the 23 January 2022 we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of insulin successfully being used to treat diabetes in humans. This development marked a new era in the management of diabetes.

Before the discovery of insulin, the prognosis for people living with diabetes was very poor. People with diabetes followed various diets like the ‘meat diet’ that severely restricted carbohydrates or the ‘starvation diet’ that advocated total fasting. These diets had limited success in preventing deaths from ‘diabetic comas’, known today as diabetic ketoacidosis. Diabetic ketoacidosis is caused by extremely high glucose levels due to a lack of insulin (Schadewaldt, 1989).

In the last 100 years, insulin has become widely used to manage various forms of diabetes. Everyone with type 1 diabetes, except those who have received pancreas or islet-cell transplants, and more than half of people with type 2 diabetes use insulin to manage their diabetes (Gough and Narendran, 2017). For many people with access to insulin, being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes is no longer a death sentence. Instead, it is seen as a long-term condition that can be self-managed for people with access to insulin and glucose monitoring technology.