Impact of Computer Simulation on Diabetes Research and Practice

Impact of Computer Simulation on Diabetes Research and PracticeDiabetes is usually delineated by a simple measurement-the blood glucose concentration.The simplicity of this diagnosis belies a complex disease that involves many organ systems and can be affected by various internal and environmental factors.In treating diabetes, clinicians must consider all of these factors simultaneously and then prescribe therapies that may involve insulin, sulfonylureas, and life-style adaptations to minimize hyperglycemia while avoiding hypoglycemia.Because of the complexity of blood glucose regulation, it is clearly a great art to balance all factors that affect blood glucose and optimize diabetes therapy.Like many arts, the management of diabetes may require years to master and may be difficult to teach to others.Objective methods for analyzing factors that regulate blood glucose should facilitate the implementation and teaching of diabetes management by transforming the art into a series of objective, well-defined, and reproducible rules.Mathematics has long been used to predict the behavior of complex systems when human intuition is inadequate or too imprecise for the task.The availability of the computer has greatly increased our ability to make such predictions.Everyone is aware of the use of digital computers to predict the weather, the path of rockets,