Diabetics: Roche Says It Can Save You Big Money

Diabetics: Roche says it can save you big money

Type 2 diabetes can wreak havoc on your health. While lifestyle changes can help keep diabetes under control, many patients require oral medications or insulin injections as forms of treatment, too. Watch the video for how diabetes affects your body. Time
Pharmaceuticals maker Roche overhauled its blood glucose monitoring system and introduced a new discounting offer that it says could save uninsured diabetics by thousands of dollars per year.
The move could help alleviate political pressure as the drug industry faces mounting scrutiny over prices. It also comes amid increasing competition among blood glucose monitoring makers as diabetes rates rise.
The new system pairs a free blood glucose meter with a smartphone app and discounted test strips. With some diabetics paying as much as $2 a strip for other offerings, the new Roche system paired with a free savings card could cut costs to as little as 40 cents per strip in the first 50-count box, then 20 cents per strip in subsequent boxes.
The nation's 29-million diabetics pay widely varying prices for testing products, in part because many of them are covered by insurance. Roches' move is likely to provide the biggest help to the uninsured. The average American diabetic paid $1,922 in out-of-pocket expenses for care in 2013, compared to $738 for someone without the condition, according to the Health Care Cost Institute.
For "the average patient, managing diabetes and acquiring all of the testing and therapy supplies can be very difficult to navigate, really complex and very often very expensive," said Brad Moore, head of Continue reading

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Can people with type 2 diabetes eat honey?

People with diabetes are often told they should not eat sweets and other foods that contain sugar because they may cause a spike in blood sugar levels. So, could honey be a healthful alternative to sugar-filled sweets and snacks?
Blood sugar (glucose) levels are the amounts of sugar found in the blood. Sugar is the body's primary source of energy.
Insulin is secreted from the pancreas to maintain blood sugar. The bodies of people with diabetes do not produce enough insulin or use it correctly.
Contents of this article:
What are carbohydrates?
Carbohydrates, which are broken down into sugar provide the body with most of its needed energy. Carbohydrates make up half of recommended daily caloric intake.
Carbohydrates are present in most foods, including:
fruits
vegetables
milk
grains
beans
honey
white sugar
brown sugar
candy
desserts
The amount and type of carbohydrates consumed affect blood sugar levels. To keep their blood sugar at a safe level, people with diabetes should limit their total carbohydrate intake to between 45 grams (g) and 60 g per meal or less. As such, it is important to choose healthful, non-processed, high-fiber carbohydrates and control portion sizes.
What is honey?
Raw honey starts out as flower nectar. After being collected by bees, nectar naturally breaks down into simple sugars and is stored in honeycombs. The honeycombs trigger the nectar to evaporate, which creates a thick, sweet liquid known as honey.
Honey, like other sugars, is a condensed source of carbohydrates. One tablespoon of honey contains at least 17 g of carbohydrates.
While this amount Continue reading

Is Type 2 diabetes reversible?

Katy Wiley began her struggle with Type 2 diabetes in 1990, when she was pregnant with her second child. The disease progressed, and at eight weeks she started insulin treatment, hoping that once her son was born, the diabetes would disappear. Instead, her condition steadily declined.
Vision problems and nerve damage, common complications of diabetes, began to appear. Her A1C blood glucose (sugar) levels were increasing, she was at least 50 pounds overweight and the medication metformin had been added to her daily therapy routine of insulin injection. That's when she read about a Type 2 diabetes study at Cleveland Clinic that was recruiting patients to participate in one of three arms of treatments to study the effectiveness of methods to treat and possibly reverse Type 2 diabetes.
The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) says that Type 2 diabetes usually begins with insulin resistance or the inability of the fat, muscle and liver cells to use the insulin produced in the pancreas to carry sugar into the body's cells to use for energy. At first, the pancreas will work harder to make extra insulin, but eventually it won't be able to keep making enough to maintain normal blood glucose levels, and glucose will build up in the blood instead of nourishing the cells. That's when diabetes Type 2 has developed and needs to be treated.
In the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 29.1 million people — 9.3 percent of the population — have diabetes. About 95 percent of those people have Type 2 diabetes, a disease that can b Continue reading

Regular drinking can reduce risk of developing diabetes, study suggests

Drinking alcohol three to four times per week could significantly reduce a person's chances of developing diabetes, according to a new study.
Wine is tipped to be the most beneficial, followed by beer, but researchers warn that clear spirits, such as gin and vodka, could substantially increase a woman's chances of succumbing to the condition.
Experts argue, however, that the health impacts of alcohol consumption can vary from person to person and the study should not be taken as a "green light" for excessive drinking.
The new research, published in European medical journal Diabetologia, surveyed more than 70,000 Danish participants on their drinking habits over the course of five years.
Of the 859 men and 887 women who developed diabetes over this period – either type 1 or type 2 – those who drank frequently emerged as the least at risk.
The lowest risk of diabetes was observed at 14 drinks per week in men and nine drinks per week in women.
"Our findings suggest that alcohol drinking frequency is associated with the risk of diabetes and that consumption of alcohol over three to four weekdays is associated with the lowest risks of diabetes, even after taking average weekly alcohol consumption into account," Professor Janne Tolstrup from the University of Southern Denmark noted in the report.
The researchers concluded that moderate but regular drinking could reduce a woman's risk of diabetes by 32 percent and a man's risk by 27 percent, compared with those who drink less than once a week.
For both men and women, wine was seen as reducing the risk by more than 25 percent a Continue reading

Diabetes and Menopause – What You Need to Know

Women with diabetes may at first have a hard time telling the difference between a bout of low blood sugar and menopause.
If you are a woman with diabetes approaching a certain age, there may come a point when it can feel as though you hit a wall with your diabetes self-care. Your blood sugar levels may become erratic, you might find you’ve gained a bit of weight, and you sleep restlessly.
What you may be experiencing is menopause. Menopause typically starts around age 50, but perimenopause, the beginning stages of menopause, can start as early as 40. At this time, the hormones estrogen and progesterone start fluctuating, causing hot flashes, moodiness, short-term memory loss, and fatigue.
For a woman with diabetes, fluctuating blood sugars can also be common with menopause. The tricky thing is that the symptoms of menopause are so similar to low blood sugar that it can be hard to distinguish between the two. More frequent blood sugar monitoring is essential to identify whether the symptoms you experience are caused by diabetes, menopause, or a combination of both.
Weight gain, although not inevitable, is common during menopause for women with and without diabetes. You also are prone to lose muscle mass and replace it with fat, usually in the abdomen, hips, and thighs. Without any changes in diet, you may find the scale creeping up.
Diabetes and menopause share several other symptoms, including vaginal dryness, vaginal infections and urinary tract infections. These are caused by reduced estrogen levels in menopause, and elevated glucose levels and nerve damage with diabet Continue reading