The information presented at this site is for general use only and is not intended to provide personal medical advice or substitute for the advice of your doctor or diabetes specialist. If you have any questions about any of the information presented here, concerns about individual health matters or the management of your diabetes, please consult your doctor or diabetes specialist

Insulin Tutorial

Welcome to an interactive educational diabetes / insulin tutorial. This Web-based tutorial aims to teach a little bit about balancing insulin and diet in diabetes, as well as offering some information about different insulin-dosage adjustment regimens.

There are many sites on the Web that offer information about the different types of insulin that are available, and their action profiles, etc. However for the most part such sites provide static repositories of information which can be read / viewed - but with little or no interaction being possible.

This diabetes-insulin tutorial aims to be different by combining such purely static / informational Web pages with a more dynamic Web-based diabetes simulator to allow interactive educational simulations to be performed of clinically relevant diabetes situations. Therefore, while reading about, say, "conventional insulin therapy" it is possible to click on an HTML link and see some examples of such therapeutic regimens being simulated.

We hope this approach will provide a more integrated (and fun) way for people to learn some more about the 'roller coaster' ride that can be diabetes. We also expect that combining static / informational Web-based resources with 'AIDA on-line' will offer a more intelligent way of making use of what the on-line diabetes simulator can offer.

As usual there are some caveats (warnings) that need to be appreciated and understood.

Diabetes practices and regimens can vary between countries, hospitals / clinics, and even between specialists. Therefore what may be encouraged in one setting may not be so recommended in another. This insulin tutorial is not meant to provide a didactic (regimented / fixed) plan for using insulin. Rather the tutorial is intended to show some possible ways of doing things, and provide some explanations as to why things may be done in a certain way. Furthermore it is hoped that this tutorial may encourage people to think a bit more about what insulin regimens are feasible, and how such regimens might be improved and / or tailored for an individual. In all this it is important to remember that people's mileage may vary - so what works for one person may not necessarily be appropriate for someone else. Therefore, as with all medical information on the Web, it is important that - if you have diabetes - you consult your doctor or diabetes specialist before considering acting on any of the information discussed in this tutorial.

In addition this tutorial is really meant to be followed from beginning to end. Necessarily with a topic as 'complicated' and involved as insulin-dosage adjustment it has been necessary to simplify things initially and then introduce further complexities later, once the basics have been covered. Therefore you will probably find that you get the most out of this tutorial if you complete all the sections.

In order to break up the educational material into more manageable 'lessons' - the topics covered have been split into 5 sections. Please click on the HTML links below to access these in turn.

Section 1: Insulin-dosage adjustment (basics) - 15 pages

Section 2: Choosing the insulin dose - 15 pages

Section 3: Timing of meals and diet planning - 5 pages

Section 4: Glucose and the kidney - 6 pages

Section 5: Rapidly-acting insulins & insulin pumps - 10 pages (to follow)

Please note: To try and keep things more straight-forward, initially, what is referred to as 'longer-acting insulin' in places early on in this tutorial also encompasses what some people may know as 'intermediate-acting insulin'. Therefore in the text references to 'long-acting insulin' cover all types of insulin which are not either short-acting or rapidly-acting insulin preparations.

At present only Sections 1 - 4 of the Tutorial are currently available on-line but further sections will follow in due course.

In this respect, we hope over time to expand the range and variety of educational material provided as part of this on-line tutorial. If you would like to contribute some text / illustrations of your own, please feel free to contact us either via email at: [email protected] or by using the on-line AIDA Contact Form. If you might be interested in helping with AIDA or this Website in other ways - please do check out the Help with AIDA Web page.

Finally, there are some other ways that you can browse some of the example clinical diabetes case scenarios which can be simulated via this site. Click here for a list of sample AIDA cases. You can also test out your insulin-dosage adjustment skills by clicking here to try and improve the blood glucose levels of some 'virtual diabetic patients'. Enjoy!


Diabetes Insulin Tutorial
Start Section 1Right Arrow - Next Page
Insulin-dosage adjustment (basics)

The material in this on-line Diabetes / Insulin Tutorial has been drawn from a number of different sources.
However the original Web-based version can be found at the AIDA Website at: http://www.2aida.org/tutorial.

AIDA diabetes software simulator program of glucose-insulin interaction