Diabetes and Obesity Research

The Children’s Diabetes Centre is an integrated clinical and research centre conducting research into Type 1 diabetes (T1DM) and childhood onset Type 2 diabetes. The Children’s Diabetes Centre includes researchers at the Telethon Kids Institute’s Diabetes and Obesity Research Team and researchers and clinicians within the Diabetes Service at Perth children’s Hospital (PCH) as part of the Western Australian Department of Health.

Our goal is to improve the lives of all children with diabetes by diminishing the devastating impact of the disease on children, their families and the adults they will become. We focus on the care of people with T1DM and their families that includes improving the clinical and at-home management of T1DM and reducing the psychosocial impact.

Our primary objective is to generate significant new knowledge that will lead to tangible improvements in care that improves outcomes. We do this by focused research studies that include clinical investigations, clinical trials, epidemiological studies and qualitative research projects and we translate the results of these studies into the clinic and the community.

We aim to:

• Be instrumental in translating new treatments and knowledge into routine clinical practice
• Restore blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible and thus reduce the long-term complications of diabetes.
• Reduce the frequency and impact of low blood glucose (hypoglycaemia) which is a common and dangerous side effect of insulin treatment in diabetes
• Develop, test and refine new diabetes technologies such as closed loop systems and translate these into clinical practice.
• Increase the confidence of children, adolescents and young adults with T1DM as well as their families and their health professionals in using technology (continuous glucose monitoring and insulin delivery technology).
• Better understand the impact of food and exercise on glycaemic control – that will be progressively translated into clinical practice and guidelines.
• Measure and improve the mental health and quality of life for young people with T1DM and their families.
• Improve educational outcomes for children and young people with T1DM.

The Children's Diabetes Centre was established in 2015 by a Centre for Research Excellence (CRE) grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and JDRF Australia. It is the only paediatric clinical diabetes CRE in Australia.

Team Highlights

Last year, the Children’s Diabetes Centre took a key step along the way to a fully automated closed-loop insulin delivery system. Researchers in the Technology theme, working with five hospitals across Australia, conducted the first in-home trial of an insulin pump designed to predict and prevent hypoglycaemia – another step on the way to a fully automated closed-loop insulin delivery system. This study found that pump technology that suspends insulin delivery when blood glucose levels fall can halve the incidence of hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar) in young people with Type 1 Diabetes compared with traditional treatments.

Professor Tim Jones, co-director of the Centre and the Australian investigator for a global adolescent Type 1 Diabetes study, found drugs used to treat blood pressure and cholesterol in adults can reduce the risk of kidney disease in young people with diabetes. The four-year AdDIT (Adolescent Type 1 Diabetes cardio-renal Intervention Trial) study involved screening 4407 young people across three continents — Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada — with the aim of understanding more about the development of long-term kidney, eye and cardiovascular complications in adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes.

Our study exploring the effect of Real-time continuous glucose monitoring (RT CGM) on psychosocial factors, specifically fear of hypoglycaemia and quality of life in children and their caregivers found that RT CGM and remote monitoring improves multiple measures of quality of life and reduces family stress. To our knowledge, this is the first randomised trial exploring psychosocial outcomes of using RT CGM with remote monitoring.