An artificial pancreas developed with the help of staff and patients at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge is one of four new devices to be rolled out by the NHS – helping tens of thousands of children and adults living with type one diabetes.
It started during the Easter holidays in 2019. My wife Becky and I had just returned from a short break in the New Forest with our children, and we’d both remarked on the number of times our six-year-old, Zac, was going to the loo. It seemed like a lot. On the other hand, he said he felt fine and, apart from the trips to the bathroom, wasn’t behaving in any way out of the ordinary.
Around 415 million people worldwide are estimated to be living with type 2 diabetes, which costs around $760 billion in annual global health expenditure.