Diabetes Determines Professor's Direction
By Lorraine Nelson
Courtesy of Washington State Magazine
R. Keith Campbell knows a lot about diabetes. He's lived with it for more than 55 years.
The Washington State University professor of pharmacotherapy was diagnosed long before people were able to test their own blood sugar levels, but he was lucky enough to have a doctor who taught him how to help himself.
Campbell claims that teaching others how to better manage their diabetes has been his own biggest contribution to people with the disease.
He was eight years old when he was diagnosed.
During a family reunion, his father noticed his behavior was a little odd.
He ate an entire loaf of bread, kept running off to the bathroom, and repeatedly stuck his head under the faucet in the kitchen to drink.
The next day, a pediatrician tested and diagnosed him.
"I was lucky to catch it early," Campbell says. "What was really great was, I was sent to a new diabetes specialist in Spokane, Dr. O.C. Olson, who believed that it was important to educate a person with diabetes to take care of himself and keep blood sugars as close to normal as possible."
He learned that high blood sugars could damage his eyes, kidneys, and nerves.
He also learned abnormal blood glucose levels could affect his personality, making him tired, lethargic, irritable, or silly, so he taught others around him to keep an eye on him and give him sugar if he started acting strange.
Diabetes also steered his career. Campbell joined WSU's College of Pharmacy in 1968. Once word of his illness got around, he was asked to give lectures on the topic.
"I was thus motivated," he says, "to keep up on all the latest information about diabetes for two reasons—to help myself and to help me educate students, patients, and health care providers about diabetes."
In his mid-30s, Campbell nearly went blind from his illness.
He had been unable to monitor his blood glucose for many years, because the technology was simply not available until 1969.
"You just made it through the day without having too many insulin reactions or going into a diabetic coma from too high blood sugars," Campbell says.
He awoke one morning with floaters in his eye—black specs floating across his field of vision—caused by blood leaking from the small blood vessels that feed the retina of the eye.
He consulted with an optometrist, who told him they were just signs of aging and that he shouldn't worry.
A few hours later, his left eye filled with blood, and he couldn't see.
Telling him he would probably be blind within six months, a Seattle specialist administered laser treatment to his good eye and later, to the eye with the problem. The eye healed.
Twenty years later, Campbell developed a second common diabetes complication-heart trouble. He had quadruple by-pass surgery.
Campbell has type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile-onset diabetes, as opposed to the more common type 2, or adult-onset variety, which accounts for 90 to 95 percent of the diagnosed cases in the United States.
Much of the care and treatment of the two types of diabetes is the same. Campbell tells other diabetics not only to keep their blood sugars down and their blood pressure and cholesterol normal, but to take one aspirin every day.
Over the years, Campbell has lectured across the country on the subject, written hundreds of articles, and received numerous awards from state and national organizations.
In 1989 he was named Outstanding Diabetes Educator in the U.S. by the American Diabetes Association. A year later he received a distinguished service award from the American Association of Diabetes Educators.
He has been a consultant to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Campbell and fellow faculty member John R. White, who was drawn to WSU to work with Campbell, co-authored a book a few years ago for the American Diabetes Association, titled Medications for the Treatment of Diabetes.
Six faculty members in the College of Pharmacy are now actively engaged in diabetes research and education. Desiring to preserve its expertise in diabetes, the College of Pharmacy is raising money to establish a faculty position named after Campbell, permanently dedicated to diabetes research, teaching, and service.
Campbell, of course, would be the first faculty member appointed to the position.
More information is available from the college at 509-335-8665.
Lecture Details
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News Releases
Campbell Named Distinguished Professor of Pharmacy
Diabetes Control Needs Additional Attention, Study Warns
Causes For Type 1 Diabetes Remain Unclear
WSU Faculty Author Book on Diabetes Medications
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