What Is The Connection Between Diabetes And Potassium?

What Is the Connection Between Diabetes and Potassium?

Usually, your body processes the food you eat and turns it into a sugar called glucose. Your body uses glucose for energy. Insulin is a hormone your pancreas produces. Your body uses the insulin to help move glucose into cells throughout your body. If you have diabetes, your body is unable to produce or use insulin efficiently.
Type 1 diabetes isn’t preventable, but you can prevent type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes, or adult-onset diabetes, usually occurs in people ages 35 and older.
Potassium is an electrolyte and mineral that helps keep your bodily fluids at the proper level. Your body can do the following if your fluids are in check:
contract your muscles without pain
keep your heart beating correctly
keep your brain functioning at its highest capability
If you don’t maintain the right level of potassium, you can experience a variety of symptom that include simple muscle cramps to more serious conditions, such as seizures. According to recent research, there may be a link between type 2 diabetes and low potassium levels.
Although people recognize that potassium affects diabetes, research is ongoing to determine why this may happen.
Researchers in one study at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine linked low levels of potassium with high levels of insulin and glucose in people who were otherwise healthy. Low levels of potassium with high levels of insulin and glucose are both traits doctors associate with diabetes.
One 2011 study found that people taking thiazides to treat high blood pressure experienced a loss of electrolytes, such as potassium. Researchers note Continue reading

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Diabetes in Thalassaemia

Diabetes - The Global Challenge
Dr Maria Barnard, Lead Consultant in Diabetes
The Whittington Hospital NHS Trust London
Honorary Senior Lecturer, University College London Medical School
Diabetes mellitus is a major global health challenge. In 2007, around 246 million people worldwide were living with diabetes and that number is predicted to increase to 380 million by 2025. In the UK, the number of people with diabetes could reach three million by 2010. Already each day in the UK, £10 million is spent on treating diabetes and diabetic complications, including heart disease, stroke, blindness, kidney disease and amputations. People with diabetes may also develop severely abnormal blood glucose (sugar) levels, requiring urgent medical attention. All this means that people with diabetes have a reduced life expectancy. Worldwide, every ten seconds, a person dies from diabetes-related causes.
How is Diabetes Diagnosed?
Diabetes is diagnosed by detecting an increased glucose level on a blood sample. If this does not give a definite answer, an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) is done, when blood glucose is measured before and 2 hours after having a glucose drink.
In some people, the blood glucose level is not high enough to diagnose diabetes, but is not low enough to be classified normal. This “impaired glucose tolerance” or “pre-diabetic syndrome” can be a precursor to developing diabetes.
Diabetes diagnosed:
Random blood glucose
³ 11.1 mmol/l
Fasting blood glucose
³ 7.0 mmol/l
OGTT: 2 hour glucose
³ 11.1 mmol/l
What Causes Diabetes?
Insulin lowers blood glucose lev Continue reading

Radical diet can reverse type 2 diabetes, new study shows

A radical low-calorie diet can reverse type 2 diabetes, even six years into the disease, a new study has found.
The number of cases of type 2 diabetes is soaring, related to the obesity epidemic. Fat accumulated in the abdomen prevents the proper function of the pancreas. It can lead to serious and life-threatening complications, including blindness and foot amputations, heart and kidney disease.
A new study from Newcastle and Glasgow Universities shows that the disease can be reversed by losing weight, so that sufferers no longer have to take medication and are free of the symptoms and risks. Nine out of 10 people in the trial who lost 15kg (two-and-a-half stone) or more put their type 2 diabetes into remission.
Prof Roy Taylor from Newcastle University, lead researcher in the trial funded by Diabetes UK, said: “These findings are very exciting. They could revolutionise the way type 2 diabetes is treated. This builds on the work into the underlying cause of the condition, so that we can target management effectively.
“Substantial weight loss results in reduced fat inside the liver and pancreas, allowing these organs to return to normal function. What we’re seeing … is that losing weight isn’t just linked to better management of type 2 diabetes: significant weight loss could actually result in lasting remission.”
Worldwide, the number of people with type 2 diabetes has quadrupled over 35 years, rising from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014. This is expected to climb to 642 million by 2040. Type 2 diabetes affects almost 1 in 10 adults in the UK and cost Continue reading

Can Drinking Coffee Help Prevent Type 2 Diabetes?

If you begin your day with a steaming cup of joe, you could be protecting your health along with jump-starting your morning. That's because research shows coffee may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. But how much do you need to drink to reap the potential benefits?
What the Research Says
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital conducted one of the biggest long-term studies on the relationship between coffee and type 2 diabetes in 2004. They found that the more coffee people drank, the greater the protection against diabetes.
The study followed 41,934 men for 12 years and 84,276 women for 18 years. At the beginning of the study, the participants did not have type 2 diabetes. They were asked to answer questions about their coffee-drinking habits (regular and decaffeinated) every two to four years. During that time, 1,333 new cases of type 2 diabetes were reported among the men and 4,085 cases were reported among the women.
Men who reported drinking more than six cups of regular, caffeinated coffee per day cut their risk of developing type 2 diabetes in half when compared to nondrinkers of coffee. Women who reported drinking that much cut their risk by about 30 percent. Decaffeinated coffee also showed benefits, but the results were weaker.
Another study suggested that the more coffee you drink, the better. In the same year as the Harvard study, researchers in Finland, the country with the highest per capita coffee consumption in the world, found that the risk of developing diabetes appeared significantly lower in people who dran Continue reading

The Best Apps for People With Diabetes

F inding it hard to remember to log your blood sugar levels? Want a central place to store your data? For people with diabetes, technology can take out the guesswork. Read on for the latest in apps and other gadgets...
The best diabetes management is by the numbers: blood sugar readings, insulin doses and grams of carbs you’re consuming. That can overwhelm any diabetes patient.
But technology can help.
Need to record your blood glucose level? A wireless meter can do that. Want to know how many carbs are in that slice of pepperoni pizza? An app can tell you.
More than 29 million people in the U.S. are diagnosed with diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA). There’s no cure, so it’s crucial that people with diabetes deal with it daily. The more data they collect, the better their management of the disease.
Some people can log data with a simple paper logbook and pencil. But many can’t, won’t be bothered or just plain forget – and that can hinder treatment.
When patients forget to log blood glucose readings or don’t bring logbooks to appointments, time is wasted trying to have the patient recall the data, says Amy Aponick, a registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator at Shands, the University of Florida Diabetes Center of Excellence, in Gainesville. Continue reading