What Diabetes Costs You, Even If You Don't Have The Disease

Diabetes is an expensive disease to treat, costing the United States $244 billion in 2012, according to an analysis of the disease's economic burden.
When the loss of productivity due to illness and disability is added in, the bill comes to $322 billion, or $1,000 a year for each American, including those without diabetes. That's 48 percent higher than the same benchmark in 2007; not a healthy trend.
The increase is being driven by a growing and aging population, the report finds, as well as more common risk factors like obesity, and higher medical costs.
For a person diagnosed with diabetes, the average economic burden was $10,970 a year. Caring for a pregnant woman with gestational diabetes cost $5,800 a year. Undiagnosed diabetes costs $4,030 a case, and prediabetes, or having abnormal blood sugar that doesn't met the diagnostic criteria for diabetes, $510. Those last two reflect the fact that people with undiagnosed diabetes or elevated glucose tend to go to the doctor more often.
Costs were generally higher in older people, not surprising since it can take years for the disease's more devastating complications, like heart attacks, blindness and nerve damage, to develop.
About 29 million people have been diagnosed with diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 8 million of them haven't yet been diagnosed. Another 86 million, or 37 percent of adults, have prediabetes, which is more common as people age. And though the symptoms of gestational diabetes usually recede when a woman gives birth, both she and her child are at higher risk for Type 2 Continue reading

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Type 1 diabetes in children

What is type 1 diabetes?
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that causes an unhealthy amount of a simple sugar (glucose) to build up in a person's blood. Someone with type 1 diabetes can't produce enough insulin, a hormone that moves glucose from the bloodstream into cells throughout the body, where it supplies energy and fuels growth.
Normally, a child's immune system protects her body from diseases by destroying unhealthy cells and germs. But when a child has type 1 diabetes, her body also mistakenly attacks the healthy insulin-producing cells of the pancreas (a gland behind the stomach). Without these cells, her pancreas produces very little or no insulin, which leads to an abnormally high amount of sugar in her blood.
Without proper care, type 1 diabetes can cause serious, wide-ranging health problems that can damage organs throughout the body over the long-term.
If your child has been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, it's understandable that you might worry. But diabetes can be kept under control by carefully monitoring your child's blood sugar and following her treatment plan. A team of doctors, nurses, and nutritionists can help your child be as healthy as possible and teach her to manage the condition so she stays that way.
What are the symptoms of type 1 diabetes in children?
Symptoms of type 1 diabetes include:
Extreme thirst
Peeing more than usual (You might notice more wet diapers if your child is very young, or "accidents" if your child is potty trained.)
Extreme hunger
Weight loss
Unusual tiredness
Crankiness
Yeast infection or diaper rash
If your child ha Continue reading

Diabetes & Alcohol: What You Need to Know

Alcohol should be avoided at all costs by diabetics and should be added to the list of forbidden things people with diabetes can’t have including sugar, pizza, thoughts about carbs, cake, and fun.
If you didn’t catch the flagrant sarcasm above, diabetes is probably the least of your worries in life. Drinking alcohol as a person with diabetes (type 1 or type 2) is not a problem at all given you are aware of how different alcohols and situations will affect you.
While we may have diabetes, we are not lepers cast away from society. On the same note, we do have diabetes so while we can do pretty much anything we want, we need to do so with proper education and preparation.
This is not an encouragement post to go get hammered or validate being a closet alcoholic. This post is aimed to provide you with the knowledge needed to have a drink with confidence knowing how to stay safe while intoxicating yourself. I never condone underage drinking or drinking excessively just as a necessary disclaimer. Here’s what you need to know.
How Alcohol Affects Blood Sugar
Some types of alcohol raise blood sugar levels acutely while some types of alcohol lower blood sugar levels. On top of the initial blood sugar response based on your alcohol(s) of choice, almost all types of alcohol have a blood sugar lowering effect for up to 16 hours (usually 8-12). Leave it to diabetes to make everything complicated.
It is important to know which types of alcohol affect blood sugar differently so you can manage your diabetes without ruining a good night.
Types of Alcohol & How They Affect Blood Sugar
A Continue reading

Type 2 diabetes is 'reversible through weight loss'

Many doctors and patients do not realize that weight loss can reverse type 2 diabetes. Instead, there is a widespread belief that the disease is "progressive and incurable," according to a new report published in the BMJ.
This is despite there being "consistent evidence" that shedding around 33 pounds (15 kilograms) often produces "total remission" of type 2 diabetes, note Prof. Mike E. J. Lean and other researchers from the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom.
The thrust of their paper is that greater awareness, when combined with better recording and monitoring of remissions, could result in many more patients no longer having to live with type 2 diabetes and a massive reduction in healthcare costs.
The global burden of type 2 diabetes has nearly quadrupled over the past 35 years. In 1980, there were around 108 million people with the disease, and by 2014, this number had risen to 422 million.
The vast majority of diabetes cases are type 2 diabetes, which is a disease that results when the body becomes less effective at using insulin to help cells to convert blood sugar, or glucose, into energy. Excess body weight is a main cause of this type of diabetes.
In the United States, an estimated 30.3 million people, or around 9.4 percent of the population, have diabetes - including around 7.2 million who do not realize it.
Diabetes accounts for a high portion of the national bill for taking care of the sick. The total direct and indirect cost of diagnosed diabetes in the U.S. was estimated to be $245 billion in 2012.
In that year, of the $13,700 average medical spend fo Continue reading

Is it possible to reverse Type 2 diabetes?

Type 2 diabetes is a progressive condition that can lead to heart disease, nerve damage, kidney disease and blindness. However, it is possible to beat it into remission. The pancreas can begin again making insulin, the hormone that regulates levels of glucose in the blood. The liver can reassert itself as the body’s reservoir for glucose and stop pumping out unwanted sugar. And many people who have been taking tablets to control their type 2 diabetes can potentially throw them away. This is good for the NHS, because 5% to 10% of people have type 2 diabetes. However, to beat it, you would need to lose about 10% of your body weight – and keep it off.
The solution
In an analysis paper in the BMJ, Mike Lean, professor of nutrition at Glasgow University, argues that giving tablets to reduce blood sugar (the main treatment for type 2 diabetes) only addresses the symptom. “Virtually everyone with type 2 diabetes is two or three stone [12-19kg] above their ideal weight,” says Lean. “One of the great tragedies is that we’ve known this for about a hundred years and all the treatments have ever done is reduce the blood sugar – this is the consequence, but what drives it is the weight.”
Lean says the easiest indicator of someone at risk of type 2 diabetes is a fat tummy. A man with a waist over 91cm (36in) or a woman with a waist over 81cm (32in) could both be on the path to the condition. Another paper in Frontiers in Endocrinology describes a programme of high-intensity exercise as a way of preventing type 2 diabetes developing in people with risk factors. But: “You Continue reading