14th November is celebrated as the “World Diabetes Day” around the globe. There will be workshops about diabetes everywhere, speeches about diabetes, walks for diabetes patients, and tv shows about diabetes.
World diabetes day organization has set the theme for the year 2009-2013 “Diabetes Education and Prevention”. The key messages of the campaign are:
- know the diabetes risks and know the warning signs
- know how to respond to diabetes and who to turn to
- know how to manage diabetes and take control
This puts responsibility on doctors, patients and common people too. The doctors need to inform their patients about diabetes, even those who are not diabetic but have the risk factors of diabetes. The diabetic patients need to know about their disease, its risk factors and complications and how to manage the disease to keep away from the complications. And the common people need to know the risk factors and warning signs of the disease.
Diabetes is a disease that affects our pancreas, the organ that produces insulin which is required for the utilization of glucose by the body. Alternatively it can affect the mechanism to utilize insulin. This simply means that if you have diabetes, pancreas will not produce insulin and body would not be able to utilize glucose. So one will have excess amount of glucose in the blood. this excess glucose in the blood has harmful effects on different organs of the body.
Diabetes is a disease that requires great degree of motivation on the patient’s part to get along with it. One has to modify his whole lifestyle. You have to modify your diet, which really is a very difficult thing to do. Then you have to modify different habits, like increase exercise or start exercising if don’t do it before. And many more things. This all requires lot of hard work, both physically as well as mentally. This puts more responsibility on the patient as well as people around him. The patient has to be motivated and the people around him have to help him in doing so, by motivating him and making the environment and living conditions more appropriate for him to get along with his task of changing.
Now diabetes is not an easy disease, so one has to be very careful and try to avoid it as far as possible. Type I Diabetes cannot be prevented. The environmental triggers that are thought to generate the process that results in the destruction of the body’s insulin-producing cells are still under investigation. Type II Diabetes, on the other hand can be prevented by dealing with the modifiable risk factors for the disease.
There are many risk factors for type 2 diabetes. They include:
- Obesity and overweight
- Lack of exercise
- Previously identified glucose intolerance
- Unhealthy diet
- Increased age
- High blood pressure and high cholesterol
- A family history of diabetes
- A history of gestational diabetes
- Ethnicity - higher rates of diabetes have been reported in Asians, Hispanics, Indigenous peoples (USA, Canada, Australia) and African Americans.
Among these; family history, ethnicity, and history of gestational diabetes are the ones that are not modifiable, while all the rest are modifiable factors and you can prevent diabetes by dealing with these factors.
People, particularly those having these risk factors should know the warning sign of diabetes, so that they come to know that they have got the disease as soon as it begins.
The warning signs of diabetes include:
- Frequent urination
- Excessive thirst
- Increased hunger
- Weight loss
- Tiredness
- Lack of interest and concentration
- Vomiting and stomach pain (often mistaken as the flu)
- A tingling sensation or numbness in the hands or feet
- Blurred vision
- Frequent infections
- Slow-healing wounds
As soon as someone notices these signs he should seek medical attention at its earliest, so that the disease can be managed and controlled and don’t let it progress further and lead to complications.
One thing that diabetes patients need to understand is that Diabetes is not a disease that can be completely treated like infectious diseases. It can only be controlled and managed with the goal of having normal blood glucose levels at all times. For that one has to reduce amount of sugar in diet, and also take diabetes medications. There are two kinds of medications. One is insulin which is available in injectable form and the other are oral hypohlycemic drugs. Taking these aaccording to doctor’s advice along with lifestyle changes, a diabetic patient can live a normal healthy life.
There is a long list of complications that arise as a result of uncontrolled diabetes. A few of them are as follows:
- Diabetic retinopathy is a significant cause of blindness, and occurs as result of long- term accumulated damage to the small blood vessels in the retina. After 15 ears of diabetes about 10% of patients develop severe visual impairment.
- Diabetic neuropathy is damage to the nerves as result of diabetes, and effects up to 50% of people with diabetes. Common symptoms are tingling, pain, numbness, or weakness in the feet and hands.
- Combined with reduced blood flow, neuropathy in the feet increases the chance of foot ulcers and eventual limb amputation.
- Diabetes is among the leading causes of kidney failure; 10-20% of people with diabetes die of kidney failure.
- Diabetes increases the risk of heart disease and stroke; 50% of people with diabetes die of cardiovascular disease primarily heart disease and stroke).
Diabetes and its complications impose significant economic consequences on individuals, families, health systems and countries.
People living with diabetes and their families feel the impact of diabetes most directly, often through the expenses of diabetes treatment and loss of family income when diabetes interferes with work.
Hope my blog would have provided you with enough information to encourage you to change your lifestyle and to help people with diabetes.
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