In this week’s issue of The Savvy Diabetic:
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- Urge U.S. Senate to Support T1D Research Funding
- A CEO’s Journey: Dave Walton, Coming Home to T1D Exchange
- Screening for Osteoporosis Essential in Diabetes Care
- Pharmacy Benefit Manager Stopped GLP-1 Coverage … Now There’s A Lawsuit
- Put Diabetes Standards of Care into Clinical Practice
Heads Up! New Website on T1D and Aging to Launch on 15 September 2025!
Please join us as we welcome T1D to 100, a volunteer community of and for Type 1 diabetics, as we navigate aging together. Here you’ll find support, tools, and shared experiences to stay prepared, connected, and resilient—while also contributing to research and helping inform healthcare providers. Come and embrace this journey together with strength and compassion.
Watch for release details next week. In the meantime, thank you for your support of this heartfelt and much-needed informational and community project!
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- https://tinyurl.com/SupportT1DResearch
- Deadline: September 30, 2025
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The SDP currently provides $160 million annually to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for T1D research, but this funding expires September 30, 2025. This link lets you log in to Breakthrough T1D Advocacy and send a prewritten and/or personalized letter to your legislator(s).A CEO’s Journey: Coming Home to T1D Exchange by Michael Howerton for T1DExchange.org, September 2025.
Dave Walton brings a combination of personal insight and professional expertise to his role as CEO of T1D Exchange. As a longtime leader in healthcare innovation and a person who has lived with type 1 diabetes for the past three decades, Dave has long focused on accelerating progress in diabetes research, education, and care.
“We’ve got a lot of exciting things underway right now,” he says of the organization’s current chapter. That includes new grant applications, expanding the impact of its wide-reaching nationwide quality improvement collaborative and health registry of people with T1D, and finding new ways to use that data to drive research and novel population-level insights and power innovation in diabetes care.
I’ve always been interested in getting insights from data and analytics, and they were building this registry, analyzing EMR data, and recruiting for studies. I saw real potential.” Under Dave’s leadership, T1D Exchange has grown its population-level EMR database to over 65,000 people with T1D and 40,000 with T2D. It also has a separate online registry connected directly to over 22,000 people with type 1 diabetes.
“It makes me feel good knowing T1D Exchange is helping a company get a product to market faster because we’ve connected them with participants,” he said. Moreover, a research participant who might be struggling with severe nighttime hypos or an A1C above 10%, for example, may have access to a new therapy in the process. ”The direct connection to individuals and getting them into research is very rewarding.”
Throughout it all, data has remained Dave’s guiding principle. “I’ve just always been a numbers person,” he said. Even playing Little League as a kid, every time he reached base, he took a moment to calculate his new batting average. It’s no surprise, then, that he’s lived healthfully with T1D since his diagnosis. “For me, diabetes is a disease of numbers,” he said. “You can self-manage if you’re paying attention, asking why things happen, thinking about cause and effect.”
Extra news: Dave has agreed to join the Advisory Panel of T1Dto100, a new project/website sharing knowledge with the T1D aging community, interacting with the growing research community, and helping our healthcare providers understand how to treat their aging T1D patients. T1Dto100.com is launching the website on 15 September 2025, along with a presence on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Stay tuned for more details!
Read more: A CEO’s Journey: Coming Home to T1D Exchange
Screening for Osteoporosis, Preventing Fractures Essential in Diabetes Care by Michael Monostra for Healio.com/endocrinology, 5 September 2025.
Osteoporosis should be recognized as a diabetes comorbidity, and diabetes care and education specialists need to be aware of risk factors and refer patients to other specialists for interventions, according to a speaker.
Karen Kemmis, DPT, PT, RN, CDCES, FADCES, diabetes care and education specialist, team leader at Joslin Diabetes Center Affiliate at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, said the growing population of older adults in the U.S. is leading to an increasing number of osteoporosis diagnoses and fractures. During a talk at the Association of Diabetes Care & Education Specialists annual meeting, Kemmis explained why people with diabetes may be at higher risk for fractures and discussed how diabetes care and education specialists can play a role in monitoring at-risk patients.
Multiple studies have found links between both type 1 and type 2 diabetes and bone health, according to Kemmis. She said some research showed people with type 1 diabetes have a higher prevalence of low bone mineral density than people without diabetes, and other studies found type 1 diabetes increased hip fracture risk by 6.9- to 12-fold compared with people without diabetes. Additionally, a study published in Bone in 2020 showed hip fracture risk begins to rise when an adult develops prediabetes and increases further following the development of type 2 diabetes, with longer duration of diabetes tied to higher hip fracture risk. Multiple studies have also found that women with type 2 diabetes have an increased risk of multiple types of fractures.
Read more: Screening for osteoporosis, preventing fractures essential in diabetes care
A Pharmacy Benefit Manager Stopped GLP-1 Coverage for Obesity. Now There’s A Lawsuit by Deidre McPhillips for CNN.com/Health, 5 September 2025.
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against CVS Caremark over its decision to stop covering Zepbound, Eli Lilly’s blockbuster GLP-1 drug to treat obesity. When the major pharmacy benefit manager informed patients about the change this year, it suggested that there was “another covered medication that’s safe and effective for your condition and may cost less”: namely Wegovy, from Novo Nordisk, with which CVS Caremark announced a partnership just before the change took effect. But many patients and their doctors say the treatments aren’t medically interchangeable.
Studies have found that people who used tirzepatide injections, such as Zepbound, lost more weight and were more likely to reach specific weight loss targets than those using semaglutide medications, such as Wegovy. The two drugs have a different set of broader indications, with Zepbound also approved to treat sleep apnea in people with obesity, for example. Side effects can vary, too, sometimes making one medication more tolerable than another.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Southern District of New York, alleges that the change from CVS Caremark – and subsequent denials of patient and doctor appeals – violates standards for evaluating the medical necessity of treatment options under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which is applicable to employer-sponsored health plans. The lawsuit seeks to restore coverage of Zepbound for people on CVS Caremark plans and award other “appropriate equitable relief.”
CVS Caremark says the suit is “without merit.”
Read more: A pharmacy benefit manager stopped covering a GLP-1 for obesity. Now there’s a lawsuit
‘It’s Going To Take All Of Us’ To Put Diabetes Standards of Care Into Clinical Practice by Erik Swain and Osagie Ebekozien for Healio.com/endocrinology, 11 August 2025.
Diabetes standards and guidelines have significantly evolved, but outcomes have improved at a slower pace. The ADA is working on ways to implement its Standards of Care into clinical practice.
The American Diabetes Association issues Standards of Care each year that inform clinicians of the optimal ways to care for patients with diabetes. However, the practice of patient care is complicated, and not every clinician caring for the diabetes population has time to read and memorize the Standards each year.
With that in mind, the ADA has been focusing on transforming the Standards of Care into routine clinical practice. Those efforts were the focus of a keynote address at the ADA’s Scientific Sessions by its chief quality officer, Osagie Ebekozien, MD, MPH, CPHQ.
The ADA recognizes the need for us to do more than just have good science and good research. But how do we take all this great research and these great standards and translate them to everyday practice, both at the primary care level and the specialty care level? We need to think beyond what is new and innovative, and consider how to integrate it into routine practice. This is a key area where the ADA is passionate and invests heavily in resources. We’re looking to collaborate with everyone interested in this same mission.
Read more: ‘It’s going to take all of us’ to put diabetes Standards of Care into clinical practice
