Consultants
Dr Martin Press
Dr Press retired from the Royal Free Hospital in April 2009. In addition to being a general endocrinologist, looking after everything from thyroid disease to polycystic ovaries, he had been the senior physician leading the diabetes service since 1993. He has always been interested in super-tight diabetic control in patients with unstable Type 1 diabetes and went to Yale University School of Medicine in 1981 when insulin pumps first became available. There, as Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine, he looked after patients of all ages. He was particularly interested in hormonal causes of diabetic instability and showed that the raised circulating levels of growth hormone which characterise poorly controlled diabetes themselves exacerbate diabetic control. When he returned to the UK he took advantage of the fact that the Royal Free was a major transplant centre to set up a programme of both whole pancreas and isolated pancreatic islet transplantation. However, he maintained his interest in diabetes technology and used insulin pumps in more than 100 patients. Recently he has become very keen on the use of real time continuous glucose sensors to achieve better control than would otherwise be possible. He is particularly interested in the challenge of looking after diabetes in teenagers! Dr Martin Press is very well-known nationally as a Consultant for all adolescent patients with Type 1 Diabetes; keen to use the latest technology and enable people to get good control. He was one of the key researchers in islet cell transplants at
Royal Free Hospital.
