from The Human Trial and Lisa Hepner …

The challenge of making a film about this disease is that you can’t see it. People with diabetes look healthy, and it’s only when the complications become dire – blindness or renal failure – do they appear to be battling a serious disease. We’ve been thinking about how to best illustrate what’s going on inside a body of someone with diabetes (type 1) versus someone who doesn’t have diabetes.

Check out the graphs below. Both present one week of blood sugars for a diabetic and a non-diabetic. You can see that even a diabetic in relatively good control doesn’t come close to what your body does naturally. Elevated blood glucose over time translates to long-term complications, and all the frightening stats that we read about.

diabetes-chart-normal

Person without type 1 diabetes

 

diabetes-chart-erratic

Person with type 1 diabetes
(filmmaker Lisa Hepner’s blood sugars)

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