Fluorescence biosensor for continuously monitoring the blood glucose level of diabetic patients.

Diabetes mellitus is increasing rapidly and will double in the next 15 years.1,2 In addition, diabetic patients have a mortality excess for cardiovascular disease up to 2.5-4 times more than non diabetic population.3,4 In the last years became evident a cluster of cardiovascular risk factors like hypertension, central obesity, dyslipidemia with low HDL-cholesterol and high triglycerides, impaired fibrinolysis, hypercoagulation and endothelial dysfunction that has been called metabolic syndrome.5 The underlying defect that shares all these alterations is insulin resistance with compensatory hyperinsulinemia that is associated with increased cardiovascular events and mortality.6,7 Patients with diabetes and/or metabolic syndrome must be treated aggressively about every risk factors to minimize the cardiovascular events. Hyperglycemia is clearly related to microvascular complication of diabetes: retinopathy, nephropathy and neuropathy, while for macrovascular complication other coexisting risk factors are important. Many studies have demonstrated that an intensive treatment of diabetes reduces the macro and microvascular complications and the best results are obtained when every risk factor is aggressively treated.