For better diabetes care and cure

Preparing for IronMan Copenhagen 2014... day 1 and I'm on a tropical island!!

The lagoon at Escambron, San Juan (Jan 2014).
Photo credit: C Franks ©

Training started just before Christmas in Puerto Rico, a small tropical island in the Caribbean, located about 700km north of Venezuela and 1500km south of Florida. I help run a clinical trial called PEARLS in San Juan, the capital city of Puerto Rico, that's designed to help overweight and obese pregnant women maintain healthy body weight during pregnancy, with the hope that this will be good for their health and the growth and development of their unborn children. The clinical trial is designed to test this idea.

Despite being a US jurisdiction and feeling very much like America in many ways, Puerto Rico has enormous health disparities. Infant mortality, pregnancy diabetes, adult (type 2) diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are all very common. Because these outcomes are often made worse by unhealthful lifestyle choices, there is a real opportunity to intervene and improve health in Puerto Rican women. So we've been hugely motivated to work with this population over the past three years and we really feel we can make a difference.

My role on the PEARLS Study is as a co-principal investigator (the person responsible for making sure the study runs according to plan) along with my colleague (and co-principal investigator) at the University of Puerto Rico, Dr. Kaumudi Joshipura. The study is part of a new initiative organised by the US government (National Institutes of Health) to conduct several clinical trials of this kind throughout North America. Whilst Dr. Joshipura is the driving force behind the PEARLS Study, my presence in Puerto Rico working alongside her and the rest of the PEARLS team has been an important part of my role in PEARLS. So, every few months for the past three years, I've traveled out to San Juan to work at the field center and to Washington D.C. to meet with the senior investigators from the other North American centers. 

My work on Puerto Rico and elsewhere around the globe means I travel a lot. I hate being apart from my wife and kids for more than a few days, so on my latest trip to Puerto Rico we decided to head there together. Logistically it was challenging, arranging home-schooling for the kids and finding a place to stay, but the trip turned out to be a great life experience for the whole family. When I went to work, and the kids had finished home school, they hit the beach, the museums, and the parks!! What a life!!

Puerto Rico has a wonderful tropical climate that stays fairly constant year round. It also has an excellent triathlon club called TriSpot! So at 4am, 6 days a week, my wife and I dragged ourselves out of bed and headed down to the Olympic standard pool at Parc Central, the lagoon at Escambron (see photo above), or the running track to train with the local triathletes. Training sessions typically comprised 100km of biking at the weekend, 5km of swimming Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and 10-15km of running on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Once training was done, a quick shower, breakfast and I headed down to University Hospital to start work by 8am!! A tough routine, but by the time we returned to Sweden in early 2014, Camilla and I were at the peak of fitness and ready to get stuck into stage 2 of our IronMan training programs :-)