Did Insomnia and a IPad Game Save My Life?

I often doze off in my recliner these days. Last weekend I woke up around 1 am to hear a lawyer informing me that if I took Januvia, a diabetic drug, I was at high risk for pancreatic cancer and getting ripped off by the aforesaid personal injury lawyer. Yipes! I've been on Januvia for several years. Luckily, I had my half year check up on Tuesday so I had a chance to ask my doctor about this. He said he had heard the rumors and had read up on the issue and made calls about it as well. To the best of his knowledge there had been no cases of pancreatic cancer associated with Januvia and that the concern was based on an animal study from a few years back. The problem is that all diabetics are at an increased risk of pancreatitis, a potentially fatal inflammation of the insulin producing gland, as well as pancreatic cancer. Diabetics are at increased risk for everything except getting hit by a bus. All drugs have some risk and Januvia might double your chance of getting pancreatitis from 3 in a 1000 to 6 in a 1000. I've played the horses all my life and never hit a 160 to 1 shot so my doctor and I decided to let things ride for the next six months. That was a particularly important decision because the combination of medicine I was on lowered my A1C score from  7.5 to 7.0 (5.8 is the top end of normal)

Fast forward to the next day. I was on my IPad playing a wonderful game called Stock Wars. The game pits me versus 135,000 other "investors" who buy and sell real stocks using real news stories and play money.  I follow the strategy recommended by Peter Lynch to invest in things you know so I'm heavily into Green Mountain Coffee. I learned that despite buy recommendations from some stock bloggers, an insider had just sold 95,000 shares causing the price to drop. I turned to another app called StockTouch to find an alternate investment. StockTouch follows the top 100 companies in 9 sectors and labels them green for going up and red for going down. We geezers are doing wonders for the Health Care Sector so I clicked on that day's winner Eli Lilly and discovered something very troubling.

StockTouch had included an article about Januvia and its sister drugs. A brand new study from the UCLA school of medicine had just been released this week in the medical journal Diabetes. The study showed how Januvia worked in the pancreas. It worked by stimulating the creation of abnormal cells in the pancreas. Besides that the pancreases of a number of people taking Januvia showed precanerous tumors while those diabetics not taking the pill and the non-diabetic control group showed none of these signs. I faxed this over to my doctor and 24 hours later I was off Januvia and given two months to see if I needed to replace it with insulin. Don't know if the doc was responding to my repeated concern or the new data, but I've been Januvia free for two days. Sadly, I'm also going to be beer and carbohydrate free from now on.

Now here's the thing. I hear it takes two miracles to make a saint. Me finding this article out of all the data on my IPad app is something like a miracle. IPad=Steve Jobs, America's most famous victim of pancreatic cancer. Saint Steve?