In 1999, PEGGY BRYANT, a fifty -year -old nurse in Boston, received a postcard with whether she wants to participate in a clinical trial aimed at preventing diabetes. Well, this is suitableI thought. How many patients have you asked for registration in experiments? Bryant, who has long struggled with her weight, told me that she is interested in people who deal with serious complications of diabetes-loss of drawing, kidney failure, amputation of the limbs-and anxiety that “complete diabetes may be in my future.” I decided to register. Some of the participants in the trial were given a drug called metformin. I gave others fake. Bryant was appointed in a third group, where the volunteers did not receive a pill, but instead worked with experience employees to achieve their health goals, exercise more, and weight loss. Once once a month, gave blood and urine samples. “I changed the way I approached my health,” she told me. “Employees have so much that he made you more committed.” The study found that in people with diabetes, metformin reduced the risk of diabetes by about a third; Reducing the intervention similar to life from risk by more than half. Both components were so successful that the experiment had stopped early. (All participants have obtained an intervention similar to life for a year; and since then, the study was often monitored.) The Minister of Health and Humanitarian Services held a press conference to announce the results. David M. told me. Nathan, Professor Harvard who headed the study, “I was doing it for a long time, and I have never heard about the results of the study announced by the HHS president.” “It was a great ridiculous deal.”
Diabetes is a lifelong condition that can vary its consequences: nerve damage, heart disease, digestive problems, foot ulcers. It affects nearly forty million Americans and kills more than a hundred thousand every year. Nathan said: “His studies seemed for three or five short -sighted years,” Nathan said. His team applied for financing to expand their project and consider follow -up questions. How long does health benefits continue? How do blood sugar levels affect the body and the brain over time? For more than a quarter of a century, Nathan and his colleagues follow thousands of patients – which were of itself a achievement of logistical and scientific endurance. (Many doctors are struggling to urge their patients to attend the annual physical, not to mention their involvement to study this period.)
The study of the results of the Diabetes Prevention Program, as it is known, led to more than two hundred scientific publications. Simply by continuing to exist, it has overcome one of the central difficulties of chronic removal research: time. Most studies record patients for several months or years. However, if you want to prove that a medicine or lifestyle can extend a person’s life – not theory but in reality – you have to follow them, well, a lot of his life. And studying a condition with large -scale effects, such as diabetes, you tend to collect large -scale data: genetic information, nutritional habits, photography, and metabolic signs. The study collected hundreds of thousands of samples, which works as a kind of time capsule for America’s health. Such medical information can often lead to unexpected breakthroughs. This month, a study found that people who participated in a diet and a strict diet treatment program in the late 1990s, as Bryant did, were less likely to develop diabetes after decades. Middle -aged investments in the health complex at an older age. With the progress of the study, the researchers turned their focus into a link between diabetes and dementia.
Study financing comes from the National Health Institutes, which in 2022 committed about eighty million dollars to cover five years of research, one of the largest grants. The National Institutes of Health sends money to the Cootrding Center – in this case, Colombia University – which distributes money to dozens of experimental sites participating throughout the country. However, in early March, the Trump administration freezed Hundreds of millions of dollars In Colombia’s financing, a diabetes study was suddenly completed. Colombia cooperating in other institutions has reported that the work of the experiment needs to stop immediately. Nathan said: “We had to invite some of the participants that night and tell them not to come the next day.” Bryant, who is now living in New York City, has received a call from a study at the Montefiore Einstein Medical Center to inform her of the cancellation. “I was shocked,” she said. “It looked useless.” A few days later, she joined the other participants in the Montefiore study in an enlargement call with a head researcher on the site and a member of the Executive Committee for the study, a endocrinologist called the Crandall generation. Even the national health institutes team that supervises the grant had been blinded, Crandall told me. They learned of the end not from the government for which they work, but from the leaders of the study. “They were completely dark,” she said.
When Bryant joined the trial, her daughter was a child; Her daughter now has two children on his own. In the Montefior video call, Bryant noticed an older man who looked sick-a participant colleague who seemed asleep or unconscious. The man’s wife was there. She grabbed his hand explaining that he had dementia, and that he had advanced. She wanted everyone to understand the searches that they were participating in. Perhaps it was hidden somewhere at the time when the capsule was a key to prevent, or at least delay, such a result. “I thought, Wow, this could be one of us one day“We must do more – more. Instead, we are here, we are moving in the wrong direction,” Bryant told me.
Robert F. Kennedy, Son, Minister of Health and Humanitarian Services in the Trump Administration, It is called chronic diseases Such as “existential threat”. He made the food against the food industry, describing sugar as a “cm” and placing a high -fructose corn syrup “to make you suffer from obesity and diabetes. From the stranger – perhaps coherent – its agency is also responsible for ending the study of diabetes that has been run for a period longer than almost anything else. In recent months, HHS, which oversees the centers of control and prevention control, food and medicine management, Medicare and Medicaid service centers, and nearly ten other entities, Reduce about twenty thousand jobsOr about a quarter of the workforce. (Kennedy admitted that collective layoffs may lead to many errors.) The CDC unit that works to prevent shot poisoning in childhood has been cleared. Another unit dedicated to helping people to stop smoking has also been eliminated, which is the main issue of prevention. In the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), veterinary doctors have focused on reducing the risk of continuous birds. Some employees who shot CMS were told to direct their complaints to an official who died last year. “I have no argument with the need for the government to do better and more efficient things,” said Lee Richard Besser, the former director of the Diseases Control Center. “But this is not about it. This is about the demolition of institutions they do not like. I doubt that re -constructing them will be possible in my life.”
Patients already feel the effects. It is estimated that at least a hundred clinical trials are at risk of stopping or already stopped, Incurred Some are dedicated to preventing sexual intercourse infections, reducing depression after birth, and keeping organ transplants safely from infectious threats. More may follow soon. Bryant told me that she works in the contract research organization that helps to register patients in experiments. Even studies sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry are affected: many partly depend on federal financing, or are managed by employees who do so. The oncology doctor told me about a patient with cancer in the fourth stage, who, until recently, had three options for experimental experiments. She now has nothing. Meanwhile, people who have not participated in the experiment will suffer from the costs of unrealized discoveries – high treatments and visions that are never achieved.
The separation in financing means that studying the results of the diabetes prevention program is no longer able to continue to collect the patient’s data as planned; It is no longer possible to pay employees to do blood, collection of urine samples, scanning, or nervous cognitive tests. Worse, the current data data is at risk. Scientists need money to store and recover samples properly; They need money to pay the price of computer servers and employ statistics and analysts, who clean and clean data. (Although the National Health Institutes store some study samples, the agency told researchers that it does not have the ability to accept the entire group.) “The lack of funding can prevent us from continuing to maintain the safety of the database,” Nathan, Professor Harvard, told me. “It is a tremendous waste of resources.” The contents of the capsule may become non -refundable.
In recent weeks, Nathan, Kandal and other study participants have worked fiercely in an attempt to restore the financing of the national health institutes. They spoke with the agency’s representatives and members of Congress. They went to the media and pressed professional societies. In March, the two -party chairs from the Congressing gathering in Congress sent a message to Kennedy and the director of the National Health Institutes of Health, and urged them to “take the necessary measures” to ensure the continuation of the study of diabetes. (The National Institutes of Health and HHS did not respond to my requests to comment.)
The more the trial is stopped, the more difficult the appeal. Experience staff are already demobilized in various clinical sites, who have some participants with decades -long relationships. “People believe that experiments are only related to data collection, but there is an art to keep the participants investing and sharing,” Crandall said. “This personal contact will fade.” She told me about a bigger participant recently. The woman did not have many family. A memorial service girl organized and ended with the invitation of the study team. In the service, the friend spoke about the extent to which studying for women – how, through her, she felt that she contributed to something greater than herself, something that might help others. Crandall said: “This is what this can be trial.” “If we leave this study fading, it will never be repeated. No one will do it.” ♦
A previous version of this article, I made a mistake in studying diabetes, was the longest operation in the world.
