Ezscan: New Technology for the Diagnosis of Diabetes

EZSCAN: New Technology for the diagnosis of diabetes

The number of people with diabetes has more than doubled globally over the past three decades. This has made diabetes an important public health challenge to every nation. There has been an increased incidence of diabetes in children, adolescents, and young adults. What is thought to be the cause of the increased incidence of diabetes is a complex group of genetic and epigenetic systems interacting within an equally complex societal framework that determines behavior and environmental influences (Chen, Magliano, & Zimmet, 2012). Prevention and early diagnosis of diabetes is important in reducing the morbidity and mortality related to complications from diabetes. These complications can include damage or failure of various organs such as the eyes, kidneys, and nerves. This paper will focus on a new diagnostic tool that can detect diabetes risk which can lead to early treatment and possible prevention of the disease progression.

EZSCAN is a tool developed by Impeto Medical that is to be used to detect risk for insulin resistance and diabetes using the sweat gland. The study carried out by Schwarz, Brunswick, & Calvet (2011) because of the growing challenge to successfully implement prevention programs for diabetes. Several attempts have been made over the last 30 years to come up with a method that is simple and non-invasive to identify people that are at risk for developing the disease. The current biochemical tests currently available to screen for diabetes are blood or urine glucose, and hemoglobinA1c, however, these tests have a low sensitivity in detecting asymptomatic undiagnosed diabetes. Therefore, it will be a great benefit to have a non-invasive, cost-effective tool which can be used easily to screen for diabetes with high sensitivity and specificity (Schwarz, Brunswick, & Calvet, 2011).

Schwarz, Brunswick, and Calvet (2011) reports that it can be very challenging to evaluate a patient’s specific level of risk in developing diabetes because of variations in genetic background, metabolic, and diabetes-specific risk. With EZSCAN, people that are at increased risk for diabetes can be easily screen within two to three minutes. In order for the screening to be carried out, the person does not have to be fasting and this device can be used to perform the test in a wide range of settings, and it takes only two to three minutes get the diagnostic result. The mechanism in which the device uses to perform the test is a specific assessment of function of the sweat gland. This is through a process called reverse iontophoresis and chronoamperometry, which allows the electrochemical skin conductance of the skin to be measured based on sweat chloride concentrations.

According to Schwarz, Brunswick, and Calvet (2011), alteration