IoT for Diabetics: Exploring IoT Adoption Issues

An increasing problem worldwide is the number of people living with and dying of critical, chronic diseases. One of these diseases is type 1 diabetes, which, as of today, is uncurable yet treatable through careful and precise monitoring. Using the Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most efficient ways to monitor diabetes and is also said to improve the life-quality of people with diabetes. However, the great potential of IoT in diabetes treatment is followed by various challenged factors regarding privacy and security. Cyberattacks can affect not only the individual patient but everyone connected to the IT infrastructure of the hacked device. Existing reports show cyberattacks against the Norwegian healthcare sector have increased by 72% over the last year, resulting in about 450 attacks each week. Still, diabetic patients tend to trust their devices to be safe and are willing to take the risk as they consider their medical data as not interesting to cybercriminals. Healthcare personnel's lack of knowledge about information security and privacy best practice is reported to be an entry point for cybercriminals to gain access to critical IT systems. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between the potentially improved life-quality from using diabetes IoT and the challenges regarding privacy and cyberthreats, including the perspective of three different Norwegian stakeholder groups: diabetic patients (type 1), healthcare personnel working with diabetes patients, and industry representatives within healthcare and security. Findings suggest that neither patients nor healthcare personnel is concerned about patient privacy or threats against diabetes IoT, despite the increased cyberthreats in the healthcare sector. It further indicates a pressing matter for a discussion about data ownership generated by IoT and a revision of privacy regulations that make it easier for all Norwegian healthcare regions to interpret, comply, and act upon equally, to utilize the technology available and ensure diabetes patients all over the country have the same opportunities when it comes to patient care

Serum levels of IGF-I, IGFBP-3 and colorectal cancer risk: results from the EPIC cohort, plus a meta-analysis of prospective studies

Several prospective studies have shown a moderate positive association between increasing circulating insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) levels and colorectal cancer risk. However, the associations were often statistically nonsignificant, and the relationship of cancer risk with IGF-I’s major binding protein, IGFBP-3, showed major discrepancies between studies. We investigated the association of colorectal cancer risk with serum IGF-I, total and intact IGFBP-3, in a case-control study nested within the EPIC cohort (1,121 cases of colorectal cancer and 1,121 matched controls). Conditional logistic regression was used to adjust for possible confounders. Our present study results were combined in a meta-analysis with those from 9 previous prospective studies to examine the overall evidence for a relationship of prediagnostic serum IGF-I with colorectal cancer risk. In the EPIC study, serum concentrations of IGF-I and IGFBP-3 showed no associations with risk of colorectal cancer overall. Only in subgroup analyses did our study show moderate positive associations of IGF-I levels with risk, either among younger participants only (and only for colon cancer) or among participants whose milk intakes were in the lowest tertile of the population distribution (RR for an increase of 100 ng/ml = 1.43 [95% CI = 1.13-1.93]). Nevertheless, in the meta-analysis a modest positive association remained between serum IGF-I and colorectal cancer risk overall (RR = 1.07 [1.01-1.14] for 1 standard deviation increase in IGF-I). Overall, data from our present study and previous prospective studies combined indicate a relatively modest association of colorectal cancer risk with serum IGF-I