Nutrition 21 announces type 2 diabetes battling initiative
The program will evaluate the health benefits and costs savings that can be achieved when Diachrome, a patented combination of Chromax chromium picolinate and biotin specifically formulated for people with type 2 diabetes, is used in clinical practice.
12/04/05 Nutrition 21, Inc. and the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara (MHA) Nation have announced the initiation of their collaboration to conduct the first Diachrome Physician Supervised Health Outcomes Initiative among Native Americans living with type 2 diabetes.
The program will evaluate the health benefits and costs savings that can be achieved when Diachrome, a patented combination of Chromax chromium picolinate and biotin specifically formulated for people with type 2 diabetes, is used in clinical practice. The program will include 600 MHA tribal members diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and it will be supervised by Corey Arcelay, MD a physician for the MHA Nation who practices at the Minne-Tohe Health Center in New Town, North Dakota.
Nutrition 21 plans to expand the Diachrome Physician Supervised Health Outcomes Initiative to include tribal healthcare leaders serving an estimated 38,000 Native Americans on four Indian Reservations in North and South Dakota later this year.
The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, located on the Fort Berthold Reservation in north-central North Dakota is home to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara people, three distinct tribal nations that were combined on one reservation by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Today, the population is just over 11,000, with about 6,000 living on the reservation and the remaining tribal people living elsewhere in North Dakota, the United States and abroad. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s the Garrison Diversion Project created the Garrison Dam and Lake Sakakawea and flooded 156,000 acres of the reservation’s prime river bottomlands and forced the relocation of tribal members to the harsh prairie uplands. Because of that, forced relocation, many tribal members who were used to growing their own livestock and food crops contracted diseases such as diabetes, heart problems, psychological and other stress disorders. Eating processed foods and sugars caused obesity and the accompanying health complications that come along with such a disease. Chairman Tex Hall recognizing the harm these diseases particularly diabetes causes among his people has declared a “War on Diabetes”.
