Sudden death due to diabetic ketoacidosis following power failure of an insulin pump: Autopsy and pump data

Insulin Pump-Associated Adverse Events: A Qualitative Descriptive Study of Clinical Consequences and Potential Root Causes

Objective: To explore the clinical consequences and potential root causes of insulin pump-associated adverse events (AEs) reported in the Food and Drug Administration's Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience (MAUDE) database. Research Design and Methods: Qualitative template analysis of narrative data in a 20% stratified random sample (n = 2429) of reported AEs that occurred during the first 6 months of 2020 involving five insulin pump models marketed at that time: (1) MiniMed™ 670G, (2) MiniMed™ 630G, (3) Omnipod^®, (4) Omnipod DASH^®, and (5) t:slim X2™. Results: Of the 2429 AEs, 92% included a clinical consequence in the narrative description, with critical hyperglycemia (i.e., blood glucose [BG] >400 mg/dL; 47%) and critical hypoglycemia (i.e., BG <54 mg/dL; 24%) being the most common consequence cited. Only 50% of the AE narratives included information to support the identification of a root cause. The most cited root cause informing remarks were issues with the pump or pod reservoir/cartridge (9%), the occurrence of an obstruction of flow alarm (8%), and problems with the infusion set or site (8%). Some clinical consequences and root cause informing remarks were cited more frequently in AE narratives involving specific insulin pump models, but manufacturer variability in the amount and type of information reported may have affected these findings. Conclusions: Our findings show general themes found in insulin pump-associated AE that providers can use to raise patient awareness of potential risks associated with insulin pump use and develop strategies to prevent future AEs. Improvements in AE investigation and reporting processes are still necessary.

Examination of Postmortem β-Hydroxybutyrate Increase in Forensic Autopsy Cases

Ketoacidosis is one of the common diseases that sometimes result in death. In forensic autopsy cases, the measuring of ketone bodies, especially β-hydroxybutyrate (BHB), is useful in diagnosing postmortem ketoacidosis as a cause of death. However, increased BHB values are not always indicative of ketoacidosis. Other causes of death, such as hypothermia, are known to increase BHB values. In addition, sometimes, we experience cases of increased BHB values that are unlikely to be associated with the pathophysiology or the cause of death resulting in an increase in BHB values. In this study, autopsies were performed to determine the relationship between blood BHB values and the postmortem interval (PMI). The patients were divided into four groups: PMI ≤ 24 h, PMI ≤ 48 h, PMI ≤ 72 h, and PMI > 72 h. The BHB values for each group were then compared. Based on the analysis, patients with a PMI ≤ 72 h and those with a PMI > 72 h had significantly higher BHB values than patients with a PMI ≤ 24 h. In conclusion, there remains a possibility that the BHB values increase after death. Forensic pathologists should consider PMI when diagnosing ketoacidosis as the cause of death.

Biodistribution of Insulin Following Massive Insulin Subcutaneous Injection

A man in his 30s injected insulin several times into his abdomen and was found dead several hours later. Micropathological findings showed alveolar injury with hemorrhaging and cerebral parietal lobe nerve cell edema. Biochemical examinations showed that the blood insulin level was high, significantly so at the insulin injection sites. The blood glucose and C-peptide levels were low. The insulin level in the kidneys was low. In forensic medicine, a postmortem diagnosis of insulin subcutaneous injection is often difficult. When insulin injection is suspected, particularly high insulin levels can be expected at the insulin injection site, rather than in the blood.

Evaluation of hypoglycemic therapeutics and nutritional supplementation for type 2 diabetes mellitus management: An insight on molecular approaches

OBJECTIVE

This review aims to summarize the current management of type 2 diabetes principles, including oral hypoglycemic agents, types of insulin administration, diet maintenance, and various molecular approaches.

METHODS

A literature search was conducted in different databases such as Scopus, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, and Web of Science by using the following keywords: type-2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), first-line and second-line treatment, oral hypoglycemic agents, insulin administration, diet/nutritional therapy, gene and stem cell therapy, and diabetic complications.

RESULTS

The first-line treatment of T2DM includes administering oral hypoglycemic agents (OHAs) and second-line treatment by insulin therapy and some OHAs like Sulfonylurea's (SU). The oral hypoglycemic or oral antidiabetic drugs have the function of lowering glucose in the blood. Insulin therapy is recommended for people with A1C levels > 7.0, and insulin administration is evolved drastically from the syringe, pump, pen, inhalation, insulin jet, and patch. The use of OHAs and insulin therapy during glycemic control has a severe effect on weight gain and other side effects. Hence, diet maintenance (macro and micronutrients) and nutritional therapy guidelines were also reviewed/recommended for safe T2DM management. Besides, the recent progress in molecular approaches that focuses on identifying new targets for T2DM (i.e.) consisting of gene therapy, stem cell therapy, and the modulation of insulin signaling pathways for the regulation of glucose storage and uptake also discussed.

CONCLUSION

The analysis of all these key factors is necessary to develop a potential agent to cure T2DM and suggest that a combination of therapies will pave the way for advanced management of T2DM.

A weakly supervised model for the automated detection of adverse events using clinical notes

With clinical trials unable to detect all potential adverse reactions to drugs and medical devices prior to their release into the market, accurate post-market surveillance is critical to ensure their safety and efficacy. Electronic health records (EHR) contain rich observational patient data, making them a valuable source to actively monitor the safety of drugs and devices. While structured EHR data and spontaneous reporting systems often underreport the complexities of patient encounters and outcomes, free-text clinical notes offer greater detail about a patient's status. Previous studies have proposed machine learning methods to detect adverse events from clinical notes, but suffer from manually extracted features, reliance on costly hand-labeled data, and lack of validation on external datasets. To address these challenges, we develop a weakly-supervised machine learning framework for adverse event detection from unstructured clinical notes and evaluate it on insulin pump failure as a test case. Our model accurately detected cases of pump failure with 0.842 PR AUC on the holdout test set and 0.815 PR AUC when validated on an external dataset. Our approach allowed us to leverage a large dataset with far less hand-labeled data and can be easily transferred to additional adverse events for scalable post-market surveillance.

Sudden Death in Adults: A Practical Flow Chart for Pathologist Guidance

The medico-legal term "sudden death (SD)" refers to those deaths that are not preceded by significant symptoms. SD in apparently healthy individuals (newborn through to adults) represents a challenge for medical examiners, law enforcement officers, and society as a whole. This review aims to introduce a useful flowchart that should be applied in all cases of SD. Particularly, this flowchart mixes the data obtained through an up-to-date literature review and a revision of the latest version of guidelines for autopsy investigation of sudden cardiac death (SCD) in order to support medico-legal investigation. In light of this review, following the suggested flowchart step-by-step, the forensic pathologist will be able to apply all the indications of the scientific community to real cases. Moreover, it will be possible to answer all questions relative to SD, such as: death may be attributable to cardiac disease or to other causes, the nature of the cardiac disease (defining whether the mechanism was arrhythmic or mechanical), whether the condition causing SD may be inherited (with subsequent genetic counseling), the assumption of toxic or illicit drugs, traumas, and other unnatural causes.

The Vital Role of Thanatochemistry in the Postmortem Diagnostic of Diabetic Ketoacidosis-Case Report

Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) is a lethal acute hyperglycemic complication of diabetes mellitus (DM) and it represents the initial manifestation of DM in about 15-20% of cases in adults and about 30-40% of cases in children. Postmortem diagnosis of DKA can only be made by applying thanatochemistry. Biochemistry applied postmortem is viewed with skepticism by many practitioners in the forensic field, completely lacking in many forensic services around the world, and especially in the national ones. This article aims to underline the importance of the postmortem application of biochemistry by reviewing the case of a person in the third decade of life who died suddenly at home due to diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), whose autopsy was performed at an early PMI of approximately 24 h. Routine postmortem examinations (macroscopic, anatomopathological, and toxicological) could not establish a clear cause of death. When attention was turned to biochemical determinations (i.e., determination of glycated hemoglobin, glucose and ketone bodies (acetone, beta-hydroxybutyrate) in the blood, vitreous humor, and cerebrospinal fluid), the identified values clarified the thanatogenic mechanisms by establishing the diagnosis of DKA.