8 Warning Signs Of Uncontrolled Diabetes

8 Warning Signs of Uncontrolled Diabetes

Controlling your blood glucose levels isn’t always easy. However, it’s also the key to staying healthy and avoiding long-term complications from diabetes. So, it’s important that you have a solid understanding of your condition. Equally important is that you have established, with the help of your physicians, a management plan that suits you and your lifestyle.
Having a diabetes management plan that truly works for you is the best way you can prevent dangerous spikes and crashes, which wreak havoc on your blood vessels over time, causing the unpleasant, painful, and sometimes debilitating complications you’re trying to avoid.
While testing is, of course, an excellent indicator of how well your management plan is working, it’s also important that you have an idea of what uncontrolled blood glucose levels look like over time.
Paying attention to the signs your body is giving you can clue you into a potential problem early on. Knowing how to spot these indicators can help you make the necessary adjustments to get things where they should be, and hopefully prevent long-term damage.
Let’s take a look at the signs of uncontrolled blood glucose levels.
1. Bowel and Urinary tract problems
Nerve damage caused by uncontrolled diabetes can result in a variety of uncomfortable issues. People with diabetes have an increased risk of developing gastroparesis, urinary tract and bladder infections, and suffering from incontinence, constipation, and diarrehea.
2. Fatigue
Insulin resistance is a common culprit for chronic fatigue. If your cells are resisting the glucose (energy) y Continue reading

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Can an online game really improve blood sugar control for people with diabetes?

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When it comes to serious health problems, you might think a game would be unlikely to help. But a recent study of people with diabetes could change your mind.
Researchers publishing in the September 2017 issue of Diabetes Care describe a study in which people with diabetes joined a competitive online game aimed at educating participants about ways to improve blood sugar control. The results were encouraging.
How a game led to improved blood sugars
In this new research, 456 patients with poorly controlled diabetes were randomly assigned to one of two groups:
Group 1 participated in an online or phone-based educational game that asked two questions about managing diabetes each week for six months. Later, answers and explanations were provided. This group also received a booklet about civics, including questions about citizenship in the US.*
Group 2 received online or phone-based questions about civics each week for six months along with a booklet about diabetes self-management.*
(*The researchers wanted to have a control group that was just like the diabetes management game group, except instead of diabetes information they provided information on civics. Both groups got a civics lesson and diabetes information; the only difference was how that information was delivered. That way investigators could say with more confidence it was the game that improved blood sugars.)
Each participant was assigned to a team. Points were awarded for correct answers, and scores were posted so other participants could compare team and individual performance (wi Continue reading

Insulin Pump Therapy for Kids

There’s no doubt that interest in insulin pumps is up among people with diabetes. In fact, the most commonly asked question of the staff at the Yale Children’s Diabetes Program in New Haven, Connecticut, is, “Am I a candidate for the pump?” or “Is my child a candidate for the pump?” In many cases, the answer is yes.
Let’s have a look at what makes a child a good candidate for a pump and what’s involved in getting started using one. As you read, keep in mind that this article describes primarily how the Yale Children’s Diabetes Program operates. As in all aspects of diabetes care, there are many “right” ways of doing things, and the diabetes center in your area may do things differently. If you are interested in any of the methods or products mentioned in this article, please check with your health-care team before making changes in your child’s diabetes-care routine.
Who’s a pump candidate?
The children who are most likely to be offered a pump at Yale are those who are working very hard to maintain normal blood glucose levels, those who are not meeting goals, those who ask about pump treatment and how it might help them, and those whose episodes of hypoglycemia or high blood glucose are affecting their school work, sports performance, and normal, day-to-day living.
However, pump treatment will succeed only if both child and parents are motivated and have reasonable expectations of what a pump can and can’t achieve. They must understand that a pump is only as good as the person operating it. In addition, parents need to be reliable, and a child mu Continue reading

Are Obesity-Related Insulin Resistance and Type 2 Diabetes Autoimmune Diseases?

Obesity and associated insulin resistance predispose individuals to develop chronic metabolic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Although these disorders affect a significant proportion of the global population, the underlying mechanisms of disease remain poorly understood. The discovery of elevated tumor necrosis factor-α in adipose tissue as an inducer of obesity-associated insulin resistance marked a new era of understanding that a subclinical inflammatory process underlies the insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction that precedes type 2 diabetes. Advances in the field identified components of both the innate and adaptive immune response as key players in regulating such inflammatory processes. As antigen specificity is a hallmark of an adaptive immune response, its role in modulating the chronic inflammation that accompanies obesity and type 2 diabetes begs the question of whether insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes can have autoimmune components. In this Perspective, we summarize current data that pertain to the activation and perpetuation of adaptive immune responses during obesity and discuss key missing links and potential mechanisms for obesity-related insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes to be considered as potential autoimmune diseases.
Traditional autoimmune diseases involve a wide spectrum of clinical pathology and include diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, Sjögren’s syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, and type 1 diabetes. A disease is considered autoimmune if its pathology is dictated by a se Continue reading

Diabetes And Influenza: A Dangerous Combination

Nov. 14, 2017 is World Diabetes Day, the world’s largest diabetes awareness campaign that aims to unite the global diabetes community to produce a powerful voice to highlight the realities and threats of dealing with this chronic medical condition.
Diabetes is a major threat to health globally.
In the U.S., diabetes rates have almost doubled in the past two decades, from 5.5 percent in 1994 to 9.3 percent in 2012. An estimated 30.3 million people, or 9.4 percent of the U.S. population, had diabetes in 2015. The CDC projects that one in three adults could have diabetes by 2050. More than one-quarter of seniors (ages 65 and older) has diabetes (25.9 percent, or 11 million seniors). In the European region, about 60 million people have diabetes, or about 10.3 percent of men and 9.6 percent of women aged 25 years and over. In Africa, the rate of diabetes remains low, but the number of people living with diabetes has dramatically increased from 4 million in 1980 to 25 million in 2014. More than 60 percent of those with diabetes live in Asia, with nearly half in China and India combined. The Asia Pacific region has 138 million people with diabetes, and the number may increase to 201 million by 2035.
The prevalence of diabetes is increasing mostly due to increases in obesity, unhealthy eating habits and decreased physical inactivity. Globally, diabetes kills about 3.4 million people annually. WHO projects that diabetes deaths will double between 2005 and 2030.
Diabetes itself is not a major problem unless the blood glucose is uncontrolled and either rises too high or drops too lo Continue reading