Grant: SPOR Networks in Chronic Disease

Individuals with diabetes fear suffering from blindness, limb amputations, kidney and heart failure, and low blood sugar (hypoglycemia). These complications are influenced by genetic risk, life-style, sex/gender, socioeconomic and cultural (e.g., Indigenous) status, geography (rural) and co-morbid disease (e.g., arthritis). Patients and non-researcher health professionals have joined our SPOR Network to redefine methods for earliest diagnosis and treatments that will transform the health outcomes for all with diabetes. With primary care and specialist health networks across Canada, we will establish a national diabetes patient registry to evaluate best methods for screening of complications and relevant health determinants. We will design a smart-phone app, Risk Calculator, to aid patients and healthcare providers in their shared decision-making about care paths customized to address unique risk. By linking clinical information with other biological factors (genetics, medical imaging of affected organs), we will identify why some individuals have higher risk than others for complications. This knowledge will guide our development of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions to be applied before clinical signs of complications appear. To achieve best glucose control and prevent hypoglycemia we will develop and test innovative external artificial pancreas therapies in conjunction with smart-phone apps to monitor glucose control, physical activity and other modulators. We will evaluate novel diagnostic tests and therapies discovered by our scientists for diabetic heart, kidney, eye and nerve disease, along with user-friendly web-based tools to assess lifestyle (diet, physical activity) and effectiveness of personalized behaviour-modifying interventions. By aligning biomedical, clinical, population health and health services research and education with what matters most to patients we will bridge the knowledge translation gap with real impact on chronic disease outcomes.