Diabetes Survival Guide Understanding the Facts About Diagnosis, Treatment, And Prevention

1 WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A DIABETIC Nobody is delighted to be diagnosed as a diabetic. After all, diabetes is a chronic disease with serious consequences and complications if it isn't kept under control. You must watch what you eat, get regular exercise, and maybe take pills or insulin injections. It is a condition that you will have for the rest of your days. So far, there is no cure. But diabetes is the one major disorder whose effects on your lifestyle depend to a remarkable degree on how much you know, and how much effort and time you are willing to spend paying attention to it. You can minimize the impact it has on your daily life as well as your future health simply by learning all about it and then living with a few rules that actually would make everyone in the world healthier if they, too, abided by them. At best, you may lose all evidence of diabetes and indeed the disease itself. At least, you may be able to reduce the amount of medication you requireall as the result of eating sensibly. The easy-to-follow plan presented here may change your life. About 21 million Americans, 7 percent of the population, have diabetes, although many of them are not aware of it. Another 47 million, including 2 million adolescents ages twelve to nineteen, have prediabetes, a condition that may lead to type 2 diabetes later in life. The prevalence of the disease nearly doubled in the American adult population from 1990 to 2002 and has risen by more than 14 percent since 2003. In adults older than sixty, nearly one in every five has diabetes, and the incidence is rapidly rising in children and adolescents. Studies estimate the cost of diabetes to be over $132 billion a year, some in direct costs, including hospitalization and treatment, and the rest in lost productivity, disability payments, loss of work time, and premature deaths. Diabetes consumes $1 out of every $10 spent on health care in the United States. To give you all the bad news at once, Diabetes is the only major disease with a death rate that is still rising. Diabetics are much more likely than others to become blind, lose a foot or a leg, have kidney failure, develop coronary heart disease and stroke. In addition, it is now thought that they are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. Now for the good news. Tremendous progress has been made in only the last few years in the prevention and treatment of the disease. It is very likely that a cure will be discovered soon. Most diabetics who not long ago would have died at an early age or would have existed with such dire complications that life would have been hardly worth living, can now lead almost normal lives and can look forward to a respectable, reasonably healthy old age. the facts about diabetes More than nine out of ten of the diagnosed diabetics in the United States have type 2, or noninsulin- dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM). If they follow the correct diet, this groupformerly known as "adult-onset diabetics" because the disease usually strikes adults over the age of forty and most commonly over fifty-fivemay never need insulin injections except perhaps during periods of stress. The remaining less than 10 percent of diagnosed diabetics have type 1, or insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM). Once called "juvenile-onset diabetics" because it typically strikes in childhood, this group will always require insulin and cannot get along with diet alone or even with oral antidiabetic agents. Type 1 and type 2 are two separate disorders, although they share many of the very same problems. In the U.S. each year, over thirteen thousand children are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. And more and more children and teens have type 2, with some clinics reporting that one-third to one-half of all new cases of childhood diabetes are now typMirsky, Stanley is the author of 'Diabetes Survival Guide Understanding the Facts About Diagnosis, Treatment, And Prevention', published 2006 under ISBN 9780345491268 and ISBN 0345491262.