Lowering Cardiovascular Disease Risk For Patients With Diabetes

Lowering Cardiovascular Disease Risk for Patients With Diabetes

BACKGROUND
Pharmacists are in the unique position to not only educate patients about diabetes but also discuss the preventable complications that can stem from diabetes. Specifically, pharmacists can help to address risk factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, such as hypertension, lipid levels, and antiplatelet agents and offer lifestyle modifications when reviewing medications and counseling their patients about this chronic health disease.
The CDC 2017 National Diabetes Statistics Report estimated that over 30 million individuals, or 9.4% of the US population, have diabetes.1 Of these 30 million people, about 25% do not have a diabetes diagnosis.1 In 2015, diabetes was the seventh leading cause of death, with heart disease as the leading cause.2 The contributing factors to these statistics include the complications that accompany diabetes, such as heart disease and stroke; eye problems that can lead to blindness; and kidney disease and amputations. There is a strong correlation between diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD), which is the leading cause of death in patients with diabetes.3 In fact, at least 68% of adults >65 years with diabetes die from some form of heart disease, and adults with diabetes are 2 to 4 times more likely to die from heart disease than adults without the condition (figure 14).5,6
Pharmacists should ensure that patients have access to all the resources needed to control blood glucose and glycated hemoglobin and should edu- cate patients to ensure they take the steps necessary to minimize risks for complications. Even when glucose i Continue reading

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Opinion Losing weight is hard but not any harder if you have type 2 diabetes

Losing weight is an effective treatment for type 2 diabetes but beliefs that it's harder to shed kilos when diabetic are unfounded, write Andrew Brown, Mike Lean and Wilma Leslie.
OPINION: A study has found weight loss could reverse type 2 diabetes. The UK clinical trial showed that 46% of people who followed a low-calorie diet, among other measures, for 12 months were able to stop their type 2 diabetes medications.
This confirms a position outlined in a previous paper that people can beat diabetes into remission if they lost about 15 kilograms. Another study showed that prediabetes (a blood sugar level that is high, but lower than necessary for diabetes diagnosis) can be prevented by losing as little as 2kg.
If weight loss isn’t already hard enough, many people think it’s more difficult if you have diabetes. One small study perhaps sowed the seed for this defeatist idea. A dozen overweight diabetic subjects and their overweight non-diabetic spouses were treated together in a behavioural weight-control program. After 20 weeks, the diabetic group lost 7.4kg on average while their non-diabetic spouses lost 13.4kg.
But there’s more to this story than meets the eye. In fact, losing weight with type 2 diabetes is no harder than it is without it.
Where does this idea come from?
Type 2 diabetes triples the risk of heart attack and stroke, and is the leading cause of blindness, amputations and kidney failure. Treatment with modern drugs improves the outlook, but complications still develop and life expectancy is substantially reduced, especially for younger people. So beating Continue reading

Prediabetes: A high-risk state for developing diabetes

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Introduction
Prediabetes, typically defined as blood glucose levels above normal but below diabetes thresholds, is a risk state that defines a high chance of developing diabetes. Diagnostic criteria for prediabetes have changed over time and currently vary depending on the institution (table 1).
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), high risk for developing diabetes relates to two distinct states, impaired fasting glucose (IFG) defined as fasting plasma glucose (FPG) of 6.1–6.9 mmol/L (in the absence of impaired glucose tolerance – IGT) and IGT defined as postload plasma glucose of 7.8–11.0 mmol/L based on 2-h oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) or a combination of both.1 The American Diabetes Association (ADA), although applying the same thresholds for IGT, uses a lower cut-off value for IFG (FPG 5.6–6.9 mmol/L) and has additionally introduced haemoglobin A1c levels of 5.7–6.4% as a new category of high diabetes risk.2
The term prediabetes itself has been critised on the basis that (1) many people with prediabetes do not progress to diabetes, (2) the term may imply that no intervention is necessary as no disease is present, and (3) diabetes risk does not necessarily differ between people with prediabetes and those with a combination of other diabetes risk factors. Indeed, the WHO used the term ‘Intermediate Hyperglycaemia’ and an International Expert Committee convened by the ADA the ‘High Risk State of Developing Diabetes’ rather than ‘prediabetes’.1,3 For brevity, we use the term prediabetes in this seminar to refer to IFG, IGT and Continue reading

World Diabetes Awareness Day 14th Nov 2017

Tuesday 14th of November 2017
City Hall, The Mall, Waterford at 5.30pm
“Turning Waterford blue for diabetes awareness!!”
Tuesday 14th of November is World Diabetes Awareness Day and here in Waterford City, it is being celebrated by turning City Hall and 35 The Mall Blue.
Please join us to see some of our council buildings lit up in Blue, all are welcome whether you have Diabetes or not.
All of us know someone who has Diabetes and by talking about it and making people aware of it is, it will hopefully get people to get tested if they think they may have it.
World Diabetes Day was established in 1991 by the International Diabetes Federation to highlight this worldwide epidemic. The 14th Nov was chosen to honour Dr. Frederick Banting, co-discoverer of insulin in 1921. World Diabetes Day got very little publicity until 2006, when the International Diabetes Federation successfully advocated for the United Nations to issue a resolution on it.
Each year has a different theme. This year’s theme is “Women and diabetes – our right to a healthy future”.
What is Type 1 diabetes?……..
Waterford Diabetes Support was set up to create awareness and support any person who has either Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes or their care-giver in Waterford City and County.
This year The Mayor will invite all who attend into his Parlour to show his support for World Diabetes Day.
Pharmacist Brian Tynan from Phelans Chemist Waterford will also be on hand to offer free Diabetes Tests to people who do not have Diabetes.
In order to highlight November as Diabetes Awareness Month 2017, Liz Murphy Continue reading

Too much sitting linked to heart disease, diabetes, premature death

Like many people, I have a job that involves sitting in front of a computer most of the day. Because I work from home, I don’t have to sit through a long commute, and my dog gets me up out of my chair for walks a couple times a day. Still, a new study about the health hazards of sitting too much (or what researchers call sedentary behavior) has made me more conscious of how much uninterrupted chair time I’m logging each day.
According to the report, published in this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine, more than half of the average person’s waking hours are spent sitting: watching television, working at a computer, commuting, or doing other physically inactive pursuits. But all that sitting could be sending us to an early grave—even those folks who exercise up to an hour a day, say the Canadian researchers who did the study.
Their findings were gleaned from 47 studies that looked at the health effects of sedentary behavior. The researchers adjusted for other types of activity people did, from leisure-time activities to vigorous exercise. Over the course of these studies, people who sat for prolonged periods of time had a higher risk of dying from all causes — even those who exercised regularly. The negative effects were even more pronounced in people who did little or no exercise.
The health hazards of not moving much are wide ranging, says Dr. Joanne Foody, who directs the Cardiovascular Wellness Center at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “While we often think of the dangers of inactivity in terms of worsening cardiovascular health, there ar Continue reading