How Serious Is Type 2 Diabetes? Is It More Serious Than Type 1 Diabetes?
A fellow caregiver asked... How serious is type 2 diabetes, and is it less or more serious than type 1 diabetes? My mom, just diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, keeps it under control without taking insulin. So is type 2 diabetes less of a problem than insulin-dependent type 1? Expert Answers No, definitely not. In fact, in some ways type 2 diabetes is a more serious disorder because your mom may have had it for years before she was diagnosed. So she may well have developed some of the long-term, debilitating complications linked to the condition without knowing it. In addition, since type 2 diabetes is a progressive disorder without a cure, over time her body may not be able to produce insulin or use it as well as it does now, and she may wind up needing insulin injections or pills. A person with type1 diabetes ignores it for a day at his own peril. He'll likely end up in the emergency room because his body can't absorb glucose without a continuous supply of insulin via injection or an insulin pump. People with type 1 diabetes typically develop such severe symptoms over a short time in childhood or early adulthood that they're forced to deal with it. Type 2 diabetes is a sneakier condition: Its harmful health effects can slowly build for years until full-blown complications, such as vision loss, heart disease, or foot problems, make it impossible to ignore. Plus it often comes with its own set of problems. For instance, people with type 2 diabetes are frequently diagnosed with high blood pressure and cholesterol along with high blood sugar. This damaging threesome can lead to progressive thickening of the arteries and reduced blood flow, putting your mom at greater risk for a slew of complications including heart disease, stroke, and nerve damage. If your mom is overweigh Continue reading >>
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Living Longer With Diabetes: Type 1
When you’re diagnosed with diabetes, you may wonder, “Is this going to kill me? How long can I live with this?” These are scary questions. Fortunately, the answers have gotten better. This article is about living longer with Type 1. Next week will be about Type 2. History of life with Type 1 In Type 1, the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas are destroyed. Before insulin was discovered and made injectable, Type 1 diabetes usually killed children within months, or even days. The only treatment known to medicine was going on a low-carb, high-fat and -protein diet. People might live a few years that way. According to the website Defeat Diabetes, “In 1897, the average life expectancy for a 10-year-old child with diabetes was about one year. Diagnosis at age 30 carried a life expectancy of about four years. A newly diagnosed 50-year-old might live eight more years.” (Probably, those 50-year-olds really had Type 2.) In the 1920s, insulin was discovered and became available for use. Life expectancy with Type 1 went up dramatically. But when I started nursing in the 1970s, it was still common for people with Type 1 to die before age 50. With better insulins, home testing, and lower-carbohydrate diets, people live longer. A study from the University of Pittsburgh, published in 2012, found that people with Type 1 diabetes born after 1965 had a life expectancy of 69 years. This compares to a life expectancy at birth of roughly 76 years for men and 81 years for women in the general population in the U.S. A new study of about 25,000 people with Type 1 in Scotland found that men with Type 1 diabetes lose about 11 years of life expectancy, and women about 13 years compared to those without the disease. According to WebMD, “Heart disease accounted for the most lost Continue reading >>
Sepsis And Diabetes
Diabetes is a chronic (life-long) autoimmune disease that has a significant impact on your life. Having diabetes means you must work to control your blood glucose (sugar) levels to be sure that they don’t get too high or too low. The amount of glucose in your blood is important. Your body needs glucose for energy, but too much of it can destroy body tissues and too little can starve your body of nutrients. People who have diabetes are also at risk of developing wounds and sores that don’t heal well. While the wounds are present, they are at high risk of developing infection. And, again because of the diabetes, the infections can get severe quickly. When infection overwhelms the body, the body can respond by developing sepsis and going into septic shock. Sometimes incorrectly called blood poisoning, sepsis is the body’s often deadly response to infection. Sepsis kills and disables millions and requires early suspicion and rapid treatment for survival. Sepsis and septic shock can result from an infection anywhere in the body, such as pneumonia, influenza, or urinary tract infections. Worldwide, one-third of people who develop sepsis die. Many who do survive are left with life-changing effects, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), chronic pain and fatigue, organ dysfunction (organs don’t work properly) and/or amputations. What is diabetes? Your pancreas is a small organ (about 6” by 1.5”) that is part of your digestive system. It is connected to your small intestine and it lies just below your stomach towards the back. Your pancreas has a few roles, one is to help digest the food you eat and another is to secrete (send out) insulin, which stimulates your cells to use the glucose in the food and drink you consume. When a person has diabetes, the pancre Continue reading >>
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5 Nightmares You Don't Know Until You're Diabetic
Hey, remember when everybody was freaking out about Ebola, because of an outbreak that killed more than 10,000 people? Well, diabetes kills 1.5 million people a year worldwide, more than 200,000 of them in the U.S. And you're probably never more than a few dozen feet away from someone who has it -- there are 30 million diabetics in the U.S. alone. In other words, for something most people consider too boring to even think about, the scale of the epidemic is mind-boggling. The U.S. alone spends an astonishing quarter of a trillion dollars a year fighting it. Or to put it another way, diabetes sucks a thousand bucks out of every single man, woman and child in America, every year. We previously debunked the myth that sugar causes diabetes, and when we talked to someone with one variety of the disease, we learned about the parts of the experience you never hear about. He says ... 5 The Disease And The Treatment Can Both Send You To The Emergency Room Comstock/Stockbyte/Getty Images Our diabetic, Zach, once woke up in the middle of the night starving, his legs feeling near-paralyzed. His memory of the incident is hazy, but the next thing he knew, he was on a kitchen chair wearing only his boxers with an empty jar of raspberry jam on the table -- he'd eaten nearly the entire thing with his bare hands like fucking Winnie the Pooh. Oh, bother. When he tested his blood sugar, it was 45 (the normal level is between 80 and 100). Anything below 70 is hypoglycemia, yet even after eating an entire jar of what is essentially pure sugar, his blood sugar level was still near emergency levels. If we're being completely honest, it's remarkable that he ever even woke up to eat that jam. By all rights he should've died in his bed. So this shit can get serious, is what we're saying. "Wait," Continue reading >>
What Does It Mean If I'm At Risk?
Being told you are at risk of Type 2 diabetes can be confusing. The reasons people are at risk can be different and some people are more at risk than others. But, there are things everyone can do to make sure their risk of Type 2 diabetesis as low as possible. Finding out your risk is an important first step. You may have found out your risk of Type 2 diabetes from our online tool, or from a conversation with your GP. Now you know your risk, you can do something about it. If you don’t know your risk yet, find out using our free Know Your Risk online toolnow. If you found out your risk from your GP, find out more about talking to your GP about your risk. If you found out your risk using Know Your Risk, keep reading. Finding out your risk using our online tool What does your risk category mean? Your risk category explains your chances of getting Type 2 diabetes in the next 10 years, and can help you to see if there are changes you can make to reduce your risk. If you found out your risk on our Know Your Risk tool or at one of our events, here is a reminder of what your risk category means. Low or increased risk One in 20 people with low risk will get Type 2 diabetes in the next 10 years. One in 10 people with increased risk will get Type 2 diabetes in the next 10 years. It is important you're aware of your risk level, even if you are currently at low risk of Type 2 diabetes. Some of the risk factors you can do something about, and some you can’t. As you get older, or if your weight or waist size increases, your risk will increase. So even if you’re low or increased risk, make sure you’re maintaining a healthy weight, eating well and being active to keep your risk as low as possible, for as long as possible. Moderate or high risk One in seven people with moderate r Continue reading >>
Leukemia: Cancer Cells Killed Off With Diabetes Drug
Scientists may have found an innovative way to kill off cancer cells in acute myeloid leukemia, all the while preserving and regenerating healthy red blood cells. The new study was carried out by researchers from the McMaster Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Mick Bhatia — a professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster University and director of the McMaster Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute — led the investigation, and the findings have been published in the journal Nature Cell Biology. As the scientists explain, conventional methods for treating leukemia focus on targeting leukemic cells, paying little attention to preserving red blood cells. But the production of healthy blood cells in the bone marrow is crucial for preventing leukemia patients from having anemia or fatal infections. First study author Allison Boyd — a postdoctoral fellow at the McMaster Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute — says, "Our approach represents a different way of looking at leukemia and considers the entire bone marrow as an ecosystem, rather than the traditional approach of studying and trying to directly kill the diseased cells themselves." "These traditional approaches have not delivered enough new therapeutic options for patients," she continues. "The standard-of-care for this disease hasn't changed in several decades." The American Cancer Society (ACS) estimate that 21,380 people will be diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in 2017. Most of these will be adults, as AML tends to target seniors. Almost half of these patients will die from the disease. How a diabetes drug kills off cancer cells To change these dire survival prospects, Boyd and colleagues collected bone marrow samples from 34 "genet Continue reading >>
Diabetes Kills More Than 10 A Day
Between 10 and 12 Portuguese people die each day, on average, from diabetes, a disease that affects more than 1 million people in Portugal, according to a national report released earlier this week. The document from the Directorate-General for Health (DGS), released on World Diabetes Day which was staged on Tuesday, shows that diabetes mortality rates have been decreasing, and that 2015 was the year with the lowest standardised mortality rate, with 19.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Diabetes kills between 2,200 and 2,500 women a year and about 1,600 to 1,900 men, which means it accounts for more than 4 percent of female deaths and 3 percent of male deaths. The disease affects more than 13 percent of the Portuguese population and it is estimated that 44 percent of people with diabetes have yet to be diagnosed. Health centres carry out assessments of the risk of developing diabetes, but the National Programme for the disease proposes an increase in the number of new early diagnoses. From 2015 to 2016, the number of risk assessments for developing diabetes declined from 621,000 to less than 619,000. By 2020, the DGS aims to increase the number of new diagnoses by 30, through early diagnosis, reduce premature mortality from diabetes by 5 percent, and reduce the development of diabetes in 30,000 at-risk users. In regional terms, diabetes is more prevalent in the Alentejo region and in the Autonomous Region of the Azores, with the Algarve being the region with the lowest prevalence. In related news, every child under the age of 18 with type 1 diabetes will receive free insulin pumps in two years’ time, according to a Health ministry spokesperson. Free access to the pumps will be implemented in three stages: by the end of this year every child aged under 10 will receive a Continue reading >>
Severe Hypoglycemia Predicts Mortality In Diabetes
In this issue of Diabetes Care, McCoy et al. (1) report 3.4-fold higher mortality in patients with diabetes who self-reported severe hypoglycemia (that which required the assistance of another person) 5 years earlier. They suggest that patient-related outcomes such as hypoglycemia would augment risk stratification and management of patients with diabetes. Iatrogenic hypoglycemia is the limiting factor in the glycemic management of diabetes (2). It causes recurrent morbidity in most people with type 1 diabetes and many with advanced type 2 diabetes and is sometimes fatal. It impairs defenses against subsequent hypoglycemia and, thus, causes a vicious cycle of recurrent hypoglycemia. The barrier of hypoglycemia generally precludes maintenance of euglycemia over a lifetime of diabetes and, therefore, full realization of the benefits of glycemic control. Although it can be caused by an episode of marked absolute therapeutic hyperinsulinemia, iatrogenic hypoglycemia is typically the result of the interplay of mild-to-moderate absolute or even relative therapeutic hyperinsulinemia and compromised physiological and behavioral defenses against falling plasma glucose concentrations (2). The compromised physiological defenses include attenuated adrenomedullary epinephrine responses that, in the setting of absent insulin and glucagon responses, cause the clinical syndrome of defective glucose counterregulation with its 25-fold or greater increased risk of severe hypoglycemia during aggressive glycemic therapy. The compromised behavioral defense is the failure to ingest carbohydrates, which results from attenuated sympathoadrenal (largely sympathetic neural) responses that cause the clinical syndrome of hypoglycemia unawareness with its sixfold or greater increased risk of severe h Continue reading >>
Diagnosing Prediabetes: How To Test For Pre Diabetes?
My quest started with first understanding prediabetes mellitus. I wanted to know the answer to what was really happening to my body, what to expect and how to manage it. I wanted to gather all pre diabetes information that is based on sound research, not just conventional wisdom. I wanted to understand why it happened to me and how do I prevent diabetes type 2. How do I stop prediabetes mellitus progression? Is there such as thing as pre diabetes type 2? Or pre diabetes mellitus? Or is it just an intermediate stage for any form of diabetes? How likely I am to get diabetes in the future? How soon? What could be the pre diabetes complications? I had many questions running through my head and so being a research scientist, I started my literature survey to find eveything about pre diabetes. Put simply, if you have pre-diabetes, you are at high risk of developing diabetes type 2, or diabetes mellitus. You also have an increased risk of developing heart diseases. Pre diabetes is a condition in which the blood sugar level is above its normal range, but still not high enough to be classified as diabetes. The normal range of fasting blood sugar level is supposed to be under 100 mg/dl. For diabetes, we are talking a fasting plasma glucose level of about 125 mg/dl. So, if you have fasting blood sugar level is between 100 mg/dl and 125 mg/dl, then you are considered prediabetic. I have listed additional pre diabetes tests later in this article. For a quick summary, here’s the infographic released by CDC in its 2014 report on diabetes and pre diabetes. But there are two specific categories of pre diabetes that you might fall into. If your fasting glucose level is between 100-125 mg/dl, then you have “Impaired Fasting Glucose (IFG)”. If on the other hand, a two-hour oral gluco Continue reading >>
Can Diabetes Kill You?
Here’s what you need to know about the life-threatening diabetes complication called diabetic ketoacidosis. Diabetic ketoacidosis is one of the most serious complications of diabetes. Symptoms can take you by surprise, coming on in just 24 hours or less. Without diabetic ketoacidosis treatment, you will fall into a coma and die. “Every minute that the person is not treated is [another] minute closer to death,” says Joel Zonszein, MD, professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. Diabetic ketoacidosis occurs when your body doesn’t produce enough insulin. (Diabetic ketoacidosis most often affects people with type 1 diabetes, but there is also type 2 diabetes ketoacidosis.) Without insulin, sugar can’t be stored in your cells to be used as energy and builds up in your blood instead. Your body has to go to a back-up energy system: fat. In the process of breaking down fat for energy, your body releases fatty acids and acids called ketones. Ketones are an alternative form of energy for the body, and just having them in your blood isn’t necessarily harmful. That’s called ketosis, and it can happen when you go on a low-carb diet or even after fasting overnight. “When I put people on a restricted diet, I can get an estimate of how vigorously they’re pursuing it by the presence of ketones in the urine,” says Gerald Bernstein, MD, an endocrinologist and coordinator of the Friedman Diabetes Program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. RELATED: The Ketogenic Diet Might Be the Next Big Weight Loss Trend, But Should You Try It? But too many ketones are a problem. “In individuals with diabetes who have no or low insulin production, there is an overproduction of ketones, and the kidneys can’t get rid of them fast enough,” sa Continue reading >>
Blind Cave Fish Beat Back Diabetes Symptoms That Would Kill People
[Editor's note: This story was updated on Sept. 22, 2017, to state that geneticist Cliff Tabin's remarks were made as part of his scientific talk.] For months fish that live in dark caves in Mexico go without food. They have gone far longer—millennia—without light, evolving to lose their eyes and skin pigments. Now researchers have discovered these strange creatures have another oddity. To survive their food-scarce environment, the fish have evolved extreme ways of turning nutrients into energy. These features create symptoms like large blood sugar swings that, in humans, are precursors of type 2 diabetes. But in the fish these changes are adaptations, not a disease. These cave fish lead long and healthy lives. Understanding how the fish remain healthy in spite of these ominous symptoms may lead to new therapeutic approaches for treating diabetes in people, notes Cliff Tabin, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. Tabin identified these features and described them last month at a meeting of the Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology in Calgary. And he and his colleagues are beginning to get clues about how cave fish pull off this feat. In humans and other mammals one of the first signs of type 2 diabetes risk is poor control of blood sugar (glucose). This happens because cells resist insulin, the hormone that signals cells to take in glucose from the bloodstream. If the problems continue, they progress into full-blown diabetes characterized by blood glucose levels of 140 milligrams per deciliter or higher, organ failure, leaky blood vessels, damaged nerves and heightened risk of stroke and heart disease. The illness kills 3.4 million people worldwide every year. Diet, drugs and insulin injections are the current treatments and, too often, do no Continue reading >>
Diabetes And Heart Health
by Paula S. Yutzy, RN, BSPA, CDE Two out of three diabetics will die from a heart attack or stroke, which means cardiovascular disease is more likely to kill you than any other complication of diabetes. I was dismayed to learn that in a recent survey of people with diabetes, many did not even identify cardiovascular disease as a complication of diabetes. Yet your risk, just by having diabetes, is very high. You need to know how to stay on top of this threat to your health. Understanding your test results for what I call the “Three Musketeers” of cardiovascular disease is a must for all diabetics and their caregivers. I encourage you to find a way to be physically active and watch your diet as well. These steps will help you reduce your risks from cardiovascular disease. The Three Musketeers I call these three factors the “Three Musketeers” because where you find one, you often find the others. You need to know them by their descriptions and their numbers. High Blood Sugar You know that you need to pay attention to the amount of glucose in your blood. The A1c test indicates your average blood sugar level over the preceding two or three months. The name comes from the fact that the component of blood to which sugar sticks, and can therefore be measured, is called hemoglobin A1c. High blood sugar is generally regarded as an A1c of over 6.5 percent. The American Diabetes Association states the A1c goal for most diabetics is under 7 percent and under 6 percent, if possible, without significant hypoglycemia. Consult your health care provider for an individual goal. High Blood Pressure High blood pressure causes stress on blood vessels and contributes to damage that also leads to kidney failure and retinopathy. People with diabetes should be treated to achieve a systol Continue reading >>
Types Of Diabetes
Today, there are 11 million Canadians living with diabetes or prediabetes. Every three minutes, another Canadian is diagnosed. Chances are that diabetes affects you or someone you know. What is diabetes? Diabetes is a chronic, often debilitating and sometimes fatal disease, in which the body either cannot produce insulin or cannot properly use the insulin it produces. Insulin is a hormone that controls the amount of glucose (sugar) in the blood. Diabetes leads to high blood sugar levels, which can damage organs, blood vessels and nerves. The body needs insulin to use sugar as an energy source. What is the pancreas and what does it do? The pancreas is an organ that sits behind the stomach and releases hormones into the digestive system. In the healthy body, when blood sugar levels get too high, special cells in the pancreas (called beta cells) release insulin. Insulin is a hormone and it causes cells to take in sugar to use as energy or to store as fat. This causes blood sugar levels to go back down. What is type 1 diabetes? Type 1 diabetes occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks and kills the beta cells of the pancreas. No, or very little, insulin is released into the body. As a result, sugar builds up in the blood instead of being used as energy. About five to 10 per cent of people with diabetes have type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes generally develops in childhood or adolescence, but can develop in adulthood. Type 1 diabetes is always treated with insulin. Meal planning also helps with keeping blood sugar at the right levels. Type 1 diabetes also includes latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA), the term used to describe the small number of people with apparent type 2 diabetes who appear to have immune-mediated loss of pancreatic beta cells. What is type 2 Continue reading >>
Complications: The Toll Of Diabetes
People with diabetes need to control the abnormally high levels of glucose in their blood because over time that extra sugar can be profoundly harmful to tissues throughout the body. Many patients find that they eventually must treat one or more of the resulting complications, in addition to the underlying diabetes. According to the CDC, some of the most common complications include: Heart disease, stroke and hypertension. Death rates from heart disease are two to four times higher among adults with diabetes than among their peers without it. The risk of stroke is similarly high. And more than 70 percent of people with diabetes develop a tendency for high blood pressure. Not surprisingly, then, whereas heart disease and stroke account for about 40 percent of all deaths, they kill about 65 percent of the diabetic population. But people with diabetes can reduce their risk for heart disease and stroke by controlling their cholesterol and blood pressure, taking aspirin and not smoking. Though not proved definitively, blood glucose control also probably reduces risk. Blindness. Because it can damage the delicate blood vessels in the retina of the eye, diabetes is the leading cause of blindness with onset in adults—between 12,000 and 24,000 new cases every year. Fortunately, blindness can be prevented by controlling blood glucose and blood pressure. Annual eye exams, which can catch problems early, are a must for people with diabetes. Kidney disease. Diabetes is the number one cause of kidney failure; it was responsible for 44 percent of all cases in 2002. Again, control of glucose and blood pressure, along with annual screening tests, can reduce the risk. Nervous system disorders. Between 60 and 70 percent of people with diabetes exhibit damage to their nervous systems tha Continue reading >>
`diabetes Kills One Every 10 Seconds'
`Number of diabetics may touch 350 million world wide' KOLLAM: On the occasion of the World Diabetes Day falling on Tuesday, the International Diabetes Foundation (IDF) has said that diabetes kills one person every 10 seconds in the world. In the same 10 seconds two people contract diabetes and the number of people with diabetes is increasing by seven million each year. Within a generation, the number of diabetics in the world is expected to touch 350 million, the statement of the IDF issued here by the Kollam branch of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) stated. Poverty and social exclusion increase the risk of developing diabetes. It is the economically disadvantaged communities that are most vulnerable to diabetes and least equipped to seek care and prevent the onset of diabetes complications, the statement said. Poor people with diabetes in developing countries spent 25 per cent of their annual income on their caring for their condition. As a consequence, the economically disadvantaged are pushed further into poverty and can even be faced with the terrible choice to either pay for the treatment and face catastrophic debt or neglect their health and face disability or death. The IDF statement at the same time states that the impact of diabetes can be reduced, delayed or even prevented by improving the living environment. Diabetes Day Walk As part of observing the World Diabetes Day, the Kollam branch of the IMA, in association with the Rotary Club of Quilon, National Library and the Dr. Nair's Hospital is organising a Diabetes Day Walk. It will start from Kadappakada at 8 a.m. and will be flagged off by District Collector B. Srinivas. District Medical Officer Elizabeth John Zacharia, Lions Club president Anil Vijayakumar and Rotary club president Alfred V. Samuel wi Continue reading >>
