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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> "It's actually pretty rampant in my family," Turturro pointed out in a recent interview. "I have a history of it on both sides -- my mother, my aunt, my grandfather on one side and my grandmother on the other side, and some of my distant relatives, too. But I didn't come from a family who sat me down and explained it, so I had no idea about the risk."
Bringing such information to light and demystifying diabetes by example is the goal of Turturro's current tour, which is being sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Sanofi Aventis. The company makes Lantus, a once-daily, injectable insulin that Turturro began taking about four years ago.
Turturro first spoke out about diabetes three years ago and has already brought her take-charge message to diabetes patients and caregivers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta and Detroit, with plans to head to Miami this month.
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In fact, her work on diabetes is not Turturro's first foray into public health advocacy. In 2002, she served as spokeswoman for an arthritis awareness campaign that was sponsored by the Arthritis Foundation and Centocor, the maker of a popular arthritis medication. She has battled rheumatoid arthritis -- a painful autoimmune disease involving inflammation of the joints-- since the age of 12.
But Turturro insisted that she hasn't always been such a paragon of empowerment.
Despite six seasons brazenly weaving and bobbing her way through a televised fantasy world of bullets, bats and cement shoes, she freely admitted that when it came to facing her own real life illness she wasn't always so brave.
"I'm not the perfect person, I'm the regular person who most people are," said the native-born New Yorker. "So, when I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I was in denial. I started to take an oral medication, but I didn't really take care of myself. It was a stressful time in my life, when my mother and father were both ill and eventually passed."
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