Message Points for Promise to Remember Me Campaign
Tell your personal story and highlight the personal toll and economic impact of diabetes
- Personal Toll
- On average diabetes shortens life expectancy by 15 years.
- Individuals with diabetes have more than twice the prevalence of disability, such as amputation, loss of vision, and other seriously limiting medical conditions.
- People with diabetes are at greater risk for stroke, heart attack, blindness, kidney failure, limb amputation, nerve damage, serve dental disease and complications with pregnancy.
- Economic Impact
- One in five health care dollars in the U.S. is spent caring for someone with diagnosed diabetes.
- The costs of diabetes every year are nearly five times the entire National Institutes of Health budget.
Tangible progress is being made
- Since its creation in 1997 the Special Statutory Funding Program for Type 1 Diabetes Research (the Special Diabetes Program) has helped the diabetes research community make tremendous progress.
- The landmark program has produced tangible results and real returns on federal investments; there are now significant research opportunities that will help improve the lives of those living with diabetes, and prevent onset of the disease in others, and bring us closer to a cure.
Benefits beyond Diabetes Treatment and Prevention
- Research underway today not only helps prevent or delay the onset of complications in people with diabetes, it also improves the lives of people who have other autoimmune disorders.
- Autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes result when the immune system goes awry and attacks healthy tissue. In type 1 diabetes the autoimmune attack destroys the insulin producing cells. In other diseases, the immune system may damage the skin (psoriasis), joints (rheumatoid arthritis), intestinal lining (celiac disease), connective tissue (lupis), or other organs.
- Overall, the Autoimmune Diseases Coordinating Committee of the NIH counts more than 80 autoimmune diseases that collectively affect as many as 23.5 million Americans.
- The common origins of autoimmune diseases mean the development of treatments to combat type 1 diabetes may have benefits for the millions who suffer from other autoimmune diseases.
JDRF is doing its part.
- Progress is being made towards better treatments and a cure for type 1 diabetes because of a strong public -private partnership.
- Compared with the physical toll of diabetes and its complications, and the growing economic burden the disease inflicts on millions of people in the U.S. each year, research funding represents a relatively small investment but one that stands to yield enormous returns, relieving human suffering and reducing costs.
- Members of the diabetic community are committed to winning the battle to cure diabetes, and already supply a significant portion of research funding.
- Advocates for a cure are asking the federal government to be their partner in this effort. Private funding for type 1 (juvenile) diabetes research constitutes about 25 percent of total research funds.
- The combination of federal diabetes research funding and private investments through the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation has created one of the most effective public-private partnerships focused on disease research and has helped move us closer to a cure than we have ever been, much faster then anyone believed possible a decade ago.
Please support the renewal of the Special Diabetes Program
- Diabetes is a devastating disease that inflicts enormous healthcare costs on the nation and untold pain and suffering on millions of people. A strong federal investment in diabetes research makes both economic and human sense.
- The common origins of autoimmune diseases mean that the development of treatments to combat type 1 diabetes may have benefits for the millions who suffer from other autoimmune diseases.
- The benefits we have already seen and those that we are poised to achieve—for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes patients and for sufferers of other autoimmune disorders—demand that we strengthen this successful program.
- FAILURE of Congress to reauthorize the Special Diabetes Program would mean a drop in federal funding for type 1 diabetes from approximately $433 million in FY2009 to approximately $283 million beginning in FY2010. This is a drop of 35% which would leave total federal support in FY2010 below FY2004 levels.
If Congress does not renew this program, federal support for type 1 diabetes research will be reduced by 35% and much of the most promising research will be delayed or halted completely.
- Since 1997, due to the Special Diabetes Program, the federal government and JDRF have made dramatic strides in research. We have identified genes that increase the susceptibility to diabetes, developed therapies that have been shown in human clinical trials to halt or even reverse the disease's progress, advanced treatments to alleviate disease complications; and developed more sophisticated tools for managing the disease long-term.
- A vigorous and focused research agenda that capitalizes on progress to date and translates basic science into clinical applications can reduce or ultimately eliminate the burden of Type 1 diabetes on individuals, their families and society.
- But without Congressional reauthorization of the Special Diabetes Program, we will see much of the most promising research delayed or halted completely.
- Critical research will be halted or delayed without renewal of the Special Diabetes Program.