“It’s a great thing,” said Dr. Paul Robertson, president of medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association said after the announcement Tuesday. “It’s wonderful for diabetics. I think it will go a long way toward being a major push against the stigma that some people with diabetes feel.”
Uncontrolled diabetes is marked by high blood sugar, which can lead to complications such as an increased risk of peripheral nerve disease, eye disease, kidney disease, heart attack and stroke. But plenty of professional athletes excel at their sport while controlling the disease, and serving on the nation’s high court should be no more of a challenge, Robertson said.
“This is not rocket science to take care of yourself these days if you have type 1 diabetes,” he said.
Some jobs, like truck driver, surgeon and pilot, used to be off-limits to insulin-requiring diabetics, who could temporarily lose awareness of their surroundings if they were to allow their blood sugar to drop too much. But such limitations are changing in the face of a flurry of litigation from people who are in good control, he said. ”I don’t know any jobs you can’t have today,” Robertson said.
Bill Ahearn, vice president of Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International, expressed delight at the news of Sotomayor’s selection. “It’s a great educational moment for people in general,” he said. “They can see that people that have type 1 diabetes have just as great a chance of success as anyone else.”
He said that keeping blood sugars within the narrow parameters that define normal can be onerous for type 1 diabetics. ”They have to be a mathematician, a doctor, a dietitian all rolled into one. It takes a lot of work, but it’s achievable.” Ahearn said the life expectancy of a type 1 diabetic in good control “should be the same as for someone who doesn’t have type 1 diabetes.”
According to Ron Gebhardtsbauer, an actuary at Penn State University’s Smeal College of Business and former senior pension fellow at the American Academy of Actuaries, a 54-year-old woman’s average life expectancy in 2009 is 86.2 years.
Key to Sotomayor’s chance of living that long, said ADA’s Robertson, would be her blood-sugar control. The endocrinologist and professor of medicine and pharmacology at the University of Washington in Seattle said that, if he were vetting the candidate, he might check the results of her A1c tests — a measure of long-term blood-sugar control. Typically, people in Sotomayor’s socioeconomic group would score a 7 to 8 percent on the test, with a nondiabetic scoring about 5 percent. Sotomayor has not made public her level of control.
About 1 million to 3 million Americans have type 1 diabetes, which used to be called juvenile-onset diabetes, according to the JDRF.
