This year marks the 75th anniversary of the American Diabetes Association and its Scientific Sessions, the world’s foremost meeting on diabetes. The meeting will be held June 5-9, 2015, at the Boston Convention Center.
The annual meeting brings together more than 14,000 participants from 124 countries for five days of comprehensive, unparalleled education through symposia, oral abstract sessions, interest group discussions, meet-the-expert sessions, and special lectures and addresses. In addition, more than 2,000 abstracts will be featured as poster presentations during the meeting.
David A. D’Alessio, MD
David A. D’Alessio, MD, Chair of the 2015 Scientific Sessions Meeting Planning Committee, said this year’s program encompasses all the important aspects of diabetes care — from fundamental research to practical patient care and family education.
The educational program is divided into eight theme areas:
- Acute and Chronic Complications
- Behavioral Medicine, Clinical Nutrition, Education, and Exercise
- Clinical Diabetes/Therapeutics
- Epidemiology/Genetics
- Immunology/Transplantation
- Insulin Action/Molecular Metabolism
- Integrated Physiology/Obesity
- Islet Biology/Insulin Secretion
Within those eight theme areas, there are specific sessions that will appeal to everyone in the diabetes community, said Dr. D’Alessio, Chief of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Nutrition at Duke University School of Medicine.
While overseeing the 33-member Scientific Sessions Meeting Planning Committee, Dr. D’Alessio also helped plan the sessions in the Integrated Physiology/Obesity theme, which includes the meeting’s first-ever symposia in two key metabolic pathways — insulin clearance and endothelia function.
Insulin levels are a continuing focus in diabetes research and management, but that focus has been almost exclusively on factors that affect insulin secretion. Very little attention has been paid to what happens to insulin after it is secreted, Dr. D’Alessio said.
“Insulin is secreted, it circulates, it binds to cells and has its effects,” he explained. “But insulin doesn’t hang around forever, it gets cleared in a highly regulated manner. The regulation of insulin clearance may have a bigger impact on metabolism than has been appreciated in the past.”
On Friday, June 5, the session Insulin Clearance as a Regulated Process—Novel Mechanisms and Implications will be the first Scientific Sessions symposium to explore the metabolic implications of insulin clearance. One of the key findings in this area is that zinc, which is secreted by beta cells, can affect liver function and insulin clearance.
Another Scientific Sessions first, the session Endothelial Function in Metabolic Regulation on Monday, June 8, will explore the latest findings on the metabolic effects of small vessel endothelia function.
“We had previously thought that endothelial cells were just a passive lining to the vasculature,” Dr. D’Alessio said. “We now know that they form a network of tissue involved in sensing, signaling, and regulation. The microvascular endothelium is where a lot of the action happens in both normal physiology and in the pathology of diabetes.”
Other important sessions in the Integrated Physiology/Obesity theme will explore insulin sensitivity testing, links between diabetes and cancer, unexpected modifiers of metabolism and insulin sensitivity, the mechanisms of action of bariatric surgery, and new metabolic regulators.
A session on Sunday, June 7, will examine the pros and cons of four common methods used to measure insulin sensitivity. The session is titled What is the Best Method to Quantify Insulin Sensitivity in Humans?
Bryan C. Bergman, PhD
“This will be a unique session where advocates weigh the benefits and the disadvantages of the insulin clamp and the insulin suppression, oral glucose tolerance, and IV glucose tolerance tests,” said Bryan C. Bergman, PhD, a member of the Scientific Sessions Meeting Planning Committee who helped organize sessions in the in vivo human metabolism theme.
Another Sunday symposium in this area is the Joint ADA/EASD Symposium—What Drives the Relationship Between Diabetes and Cancer?
“There are a lot of similar themes in terms of cellular mechanisms and cross talk,” explained Dr. Bergman, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “There are a lot of overlaps in terms of inflammation, signaling pathways, and medications that researchers and clinicians in both diabetes and cancer encounter every day.”
During a Monday session titled Modifiers of Metabolism and Insulin Resistance—Hidden in Plain Sight, experts will explore common and often unrecognized factors that affect insulin sensitivity.
“We don’t often think about factors such as stress, sleep restriction, and circadian rhythms as factors that can affect research data and test results on a daily basis,” Dr. Bergman said. “We also tend to forget that people live their lives in the postprandial state, and postprandial metabolism is anything but straightforward. Iron intake can also affect insulin resistance in ways we don’t always consider.”
Sebastien G. Bouret, PhD
Bariatric surgery is the most powerful treatment for combating obesity and maintain weight loss, but why does it work so well? A Sunday session titled Central Mechanisms in Weight Loss and Improved Glucose Homeostasis after Bariatric Surgery will explore this question.
“What’s most interesting is the extreme results that can be seen from bariatric surgery,” said Sebastien G. Bouret, PhD, another member of the Scientific Sessions Meeting Planning Committee who helped organize sessions related to obesity.
“We don’t know exactly how it works, but recent advances suggest that bariatric surgery alters the brain in ways that can permanently improve body weight and glucose metabolism,” continued Dr. Bouret, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Saban Research Institute at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.
Another obesity-related session, FGF15/19 in the Regulation of Energy Balance and Glucose Homeostasis, will review recent work investigating the role of these two novel classes of proteins. The symposium, which will be held on Friday, follows a similar symposium at last year’s Scientific Sessions that looked at FGF21, which modulates hepatic pathways important to metabolic regulation. FGF15 and FGF19 cause weight loss and can improve insulin sensitivity, Dr. Bouret noted.
