Andrea Weigl, the N&O food writer, writes about trying to lose her pregnancy weight:

I recently spent 12 days back home in Pittsburgh. By the end of that visit, I just knew I had lost weight. The reason has to be that I was cooking for my mom who is diabetic. Many of our meals centered on proteins and vegetables: ham and bean soup, oxtail soup, chili, baked cod and salad at almost every meal. We ate few carbohydrates and when we did we made smart choices: whole wheat pasta, multigrain bagel thins or sharing a sweet potato. 

I'm down to 155 pounds. I only have to lose five more pounds to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight. For the first time in a long time, I fit into a pair of pants I used to wear before I got pregnant. With such progress, I'm inspired to continue eating this way.

Dara BioSciences, a small Raleigh drug company, said in public filings it has enough money left to continue operating for 10 months at most as it burns through $388,000 a month.

The six-employee drug development company has raised $16 million from private investors in the past two years and now down to $3.4 million it will have to do another round of financing, said CEO Richard Franco. One of its treatments would be the first to control the agonizing pain triggered by chemotherapy.

In recent years the 9-year-old company narrowly avoided getting delisted from the NASDAQ exchange for being underfunded and because its stock price dipped below $1 per share. Shares are down 22 percent for the year and closed at $2.33 Tuesday.

Dara's business strategy is to develop and license drugs that are discovered by others. Dara is developing two drugs -- one for diabetes and and the other for cancer -- that the company plans to sell off before the drugs enter Phase III clinical trials, which are the final stage of drug-testing on patients.

GlaxoSmithKline's Avandia diabetes treatment should be withdrawn from the market, the British Medical Journal’s Editor-in-Chief Fiona Godlee wrote in an editorial published today, Bloomberg News reported.

The editorial comes as European regulators prepare to meet on the drug’s safety. The European Medicines Agency on Wednesday will discuss the “ongoing benefit-risk review” of Avandia, after research linked the drug to higher rates of heart disease.

A Food and Drug Administration commissioner said today that regulators considering a recall of GlaxoSmithKline's diabetes pill Avandia should "keep an open mind," Bloomberg News reports.

Margaret Hamburg made her comments during the first day of a two-day FDA advisory panel meeting on Avandia being held in suburban Washington.

"Follow the science, wherever it leads, and the rest will fall into place," Hamburg said.

Bloomberg also reported today that GSK has agreed to pay $450 million to settle a majority of the lawsuits, about 10,000, alleging Avandia can cause heart attacks and strokes.

At the conclusion of the two-day hearing, the panel is expected to recommend to the FDA whether the drug should be pulled or whether new warnings or restrictions are warranted because of safety concerns.

A team led by researchers from N.C. State has come up with approaches to making "microneedles" that could make them more practical for use in medical devices.

The scientists found two new ways to build antimicrobial properties into the arrays of microscopic needles, which not only cause less pain, but also less tissue damage and inflammation than traditional needles.

Infection has been one of the things holding back their widespread use. That's a big deal because microneedles are touted as having a range of benefits, and could become important components of devices used to treat chronic conditions such as diabetes or Parkinson's disease and make vaccinations not only less painful but more widely used.

The researchers believe the discoveries will prompt the development of new medical applications for microneedles.

One of the new approaches is to build an antimicrobial coating onto the surface of microneedles that are used for long-term use as part of devices such as glucose monitors. The other is to make antimicrobial agents part of a different type of microneedle that is intentionally designed to dissolve on the skin surface after a single use for, say, a vaccination.

Roger Narayan, professor in the joint biomedical engineering department of NCSU's College of Engineering and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the lead author of the research, which will be presented May 24 at the First International Conference On Microneedles in Atlanta.

Microneedles, he said, could be used as a relatively pain-free and user-friendly alternative to conventional needles in diabetes treatment and could also be used for new technologies for delivering anti-cancer drugs.”

Among other things, the tiny needles have the potential to improve public health in developing countries by making immunization programs safer and easier. Simple-to-apply patches featuring microneedles could replace hypodermic needles, reducing the need for trained medical personnel. They also could eliminate the risk of needles transmitting disease by being improperly reused, as they could be made to simply dissolve after the drug they carry is delivered.

The research was co-authored by Nancy Monteiro-Riviere, professor of investigative dermatology and toxicology at the Center for Chemical Toxicology Research and Pharmacokinetics at NC State, as well as researchers from North Dakota State University, Laser Zentrum Hannover and other institutions.

Jerry Mathers has been a working actor since age 2 — a cool 59 years. But in between starring as the "The Beav" on the iconic sitcom "Leave it to Beaver" and starring on Broadway in "Hairspray" in 2007, Mathers played high school football, earned a philosophy degree, served in the Air Force National Guard, worked in banking, real estate and health advocacy and owned commercial property and a catering business.

The last few months, Mathers has been traveling throughout the U.S. with the Partnership for Prescription Assistance to raise awareness about diabetes, cancer, heart disease and asthma.

He will be in Apex on Friday to receive a continuing lifetime achievement award at the Peak City Film Festival, which features the family entertainment that Mathers has been involved with his entire acting career. 

Here's the Q&A we did earlier this week:

A synthetic form of insulin has been linked to an increased risk of cancer, studies in Europe indicate, but doctors caution that the findings are preliminary and may not hold up under greater scrutiny.

The drug, which goes by the brand name Lantus and is marketed by Sanofi-Aventis, provides a once-daily injection of artificial insulin.

For many diabetes patients who depend on insulin to regulate blood sugar, the once-a-day therapy has been hailed as a benefit over other drugs that require more frequent injections.

But studies in Europe are casting a pall over the treatment. An analysis of data from 127,000 insulin patients in Germany found an increased risk of colon cancer among those who used Lantus, particularly among patients who took a higher dose of the drug.

A second, smaller study in Sweden found a similar increased risk for breast cancer, but two other studies found no statistically signficant link between the diabetes drug and cancer. The findings are published in the journal Diabetologia (http://www.diabetologia-journal.org)

Dr. John Buse, director of the Diabetes Care Center at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine and past president of the American Diabetes Association, said insulin-dependent patients should not panic about the suggested link.

"Don't stop taking insulin," Buse said. "If it makes you nervous, talk to your doctor about switching to a different kind of insulin."

Buse said most patients have nothing to fear from taking Lantus, but he said patients who have had cancer, and those who have a family history of the disease, might consider switching to another form of insulin.

Buse said more research is needed before a definitive link can be made between Lantus and cancer. He said the European studies may have been biased to include patients who were screened more actively for cancers.

A long-term study in the United States is currently underway that may be able to confirm or disprove the cancer link. That study is not expected to be complete for years, however.

A daylong conference, "Taking Control of Your Diabetes," will be held Saturday, May 2, at the Raleigh Convention Center downtown.

The conference, featuring speakers, physical activity workshops and health exhibits, is open to the public and costs $25.

Among those presenting are Dr. John Buse, who leads the diabetes clinic at UNC Health Care. Buse is also past president of the American Diabetes Association.

The conference is sponsored by the Taking Care of Your Diabetes organization. For more information and to register, go to: http://www.tcoyd.org/conferences/conf_05.02.09.php

Here's another reason people with type 2 diabetes should strive to manage blood sugar levels: Higher glucose levels are associated with lower mental agility.

Those findings are published today in the journal Diabetes Care by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and others study sites participating in a large national study of diabetes.

Researchers found that a prolonged elevation in blood sugars over three or four months led to lower scores on tests that measure thinking skills, including memory. The investigators found no correlation between a one-day spike and thinking skills.

“One of the little known complications of type 2 diabetes is memory decline leading to dementia, particularly Alzheimer's dementia,” Dr. Jeff Williamson, principal investigator for the study at the Wake Forest clinical site. “This study adds to the growing evidence that poorer blood glucose control is strongly associated with poorer memory function and that these associations can be detected well before a person develops severe memory loss."

A diet overly rich in calories and fat causes an instant imbalance in the body's muscle cells that shows up as insulin resistence, scientists at East Carolina University are reporting this week.

The good news is that the cells appear to bounce back quickly and function normally with a proper balance between calorie intake and exertion.

"Up to this point, most people have assumed that insulin resistence is a disease that requires quite a bit of time to develop, and on the flip side, quite a bit of time to reverse," said Darrell Neufer, research contributor and professor in ECU’s Department of Exercise and Sport Science and the Department of Physiology. "There is evidence that may not be the case."

Neufer said in an interview this afternoon that his group is now studying whether that reversal occurs.

The current study provides new insight into how insulin resistence works, basically describing an intricate cellular balance. When someone eats too much rich food, the body's muscle cells respond by sending out a signal that they don't need anymore fuel. That cellular signal is actually a chemical gatekeeper, which blocks insulin from doing its job of unlocking the cell to receive more fuel — glucose. If this pattern continues for weeks and months on end, insulin resistence is diagnosed.

The ECU group published its findings online in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Go to www.jci.org/articles/view/37048 or to www.ecu.edu/news