Inhaled insulin has recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and although it is not yet available, the medication will provide a needle-free alternative treatment method for diabetics.

Throughout the last decade, people were constantly claiming that inhaled insulin would soon be available, Robert Gabbay, co-director of the Penn State Diabetes Center at Hershey Medical Center, said.

However, each time those claims proved false, he added. Now, inhaled insulin is finally a reality.

"This is the first new way to deliver insulin," Gabbay said.

For as long as insulin has been around, diabetics could only receive it via injection, which makes this development exciting, he added. The product consists of two telescoping chambers, one inside the other, that pull apart, Gabbay said. The insulin, stored in one chamber, is aerosolized into a powder that is inhaled from the other chamber. Diabetics who would potentially use this product fall into two categories, type I and type II. Type I diabetes usually occurs in young people and is characterized by the body's complete inability to produce insulin, Gabbay said.

With type II, the body begins to become immune to insulin. It tries to produce more and more to compensate, but cannot keep up, he added.

Cases of type II diabetes are growing, Gabbay said. Along with genetic predispositions, factors like obesity contribute to the disease. Some type II diabetics need to take insulin, but don't, he said, "because of the issue of doing the injection."

"As you can imagine, people don't like to inject themselves with needles," Gabbay said.

But with the advent of inhaled insulin, the process of medication will not seem as unpleasant and might help some diabetics adhere to therapy and get better, he added.

"They [would] much prefer to be on the inhaled insulin as opposed to not," Gabbay said. As far as the potency of the inhaled insulin, Gabbay said, it is the same as injected insulin. He added that there have been a number of studies, which compared the two and their effectiveness.

"It seems to be equal," he said.

Although inhaled insulin has been approved, Gabbay said he doesn't know when consumers will actually see it in pharmacies. For the pharmaceutical companies, it is not as simple as distributing a new pill, he said.

Ellen Nagy, marketing manager for University Health Services, said that although she is not sure of an exact number, there are definitely diabetic patients that come to Ritenour Building for medical care. She added that the physicians practicing there stay current on medical developments. Every Tuesday the staff attends a professional education session, she said, where they become up to date with all the recent happenings in the medical world.