ATTD’2021: hanging on to the fire-hose

ATTD 2021 (the 14th conference on Advanced Technologies & Treatments for Diabetes) is currently in progress. This is one of the international conferences where some of the latest developments in diabetes management are presented. We see information about new products, the results of research studies, etc.

I’m honoured to be a delegate to this year’s conference as one of the #dedoc˚ Voices program. It’s a professional medical conference, but we’ve been invited by the organisers to be present to represent people living with diabetes. #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs, etc. We don’t get access to the “prescriber-only” information, but otherwise we get to attend and interact with other attendees just like everyone else. This year we have 25 #dedoc˚ voices from around the world attending. Due to COVID the conference is virtual this year, with thousands of people connecting from all over the globe. However the conference is running on European time, which isn’t doing great things for my sleep cycle this week!

SO much material!

We’re only one day in to the program, and one of my first impressions has been of a “fire hose” of information. I attended a string of presentations overnight, and have marked a large number of sessions to watch replays of today. Or later: we’ll see how the day goes. There are concurrent streams of the conference so some juggling is required. At least with today’s technology we don’t have to run between conference halls to get the bits we’re interested in!

There’s a lot of commentary about the conference going on in real time via channels like Twitter, and some of my comments pop up in that stream along the way. But there really is so much information to absorb that it’s a challenge to tweet everything out in real time. And some topics do benefit from a bit of cogitation to find insights. Some of the presentations are long and cover a range of topics, with a few important details that catch my attention. I’m generating pages and pages of notes!

Day 1

There has been future-product and research information about various closed-loop systems, novel insulins, pumps, smart pens, BG strip technology, CGMs, sport and closed-loop systems, pregnancy, etc. Already we’ve had Medtronic present a symposium with information about their 780G pump and lots of other things in their product pipeline, and expect some of that to show up in forthcoming updates on this site. Dexcom and Novo also ran symposiums. Terumo did a presentation about their Japan-only patch pump (which I’ve previously mentioned). There have been papers presented by companies, by universities, as well as by people living with diabetes and using “DIY” systems to manage their diabetes.

That’s one day down, with three more to go. And I’ve only mentioned some of what went down on Day 1!

It is worthwhile

Some of the things being talked about may remain pipe-dreams for most Australians for some time to come, but there’s a lot of useful knowledge in there that we can apply even sooner than having to just wait for new products to arrive. I’ll be doing my best (along with all the other #dedoc voices) to distill some of it for us all.