As death rates from cancer and heart disease seem to be on the decline, the toll from diabetes has been steadily climbing for the past 10 years. People diagnosed with diabetes has tripled since 1960 to almost 16 million. The reason for this increase may be due to the fact that we keep gaining weight. The numbers are very alarming. The statistics now state that approximately 30 percent of Americans are obese.
Is anyone concerned about diabetes? You would think so, but according to an American Diabetes Association (ADA) survey, only eight percent of people rated it as a serious illness. This is indeed alarming! Diabetes is the fourth leading cause of death. Diabetes is a serious disease. It is the fastest growing, least talked about disease in this country. It is a silent epidemic.
So why is no one talking about diabetes? Perhaps it is because diabetes is a devious disease. It hides itself behind cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, nerve damage, and eye disease. Diabetes waits for these diseases to show up first. "Most of the diagnoses are delayed by an average of seven years. So by the time people know that they have it, it's both firmly established and difficult to treat. And long-term complications have already gained a foothold," says Harvard researcher David M. Nathan, MD, director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General Hospital and chairman of a huge National Institutes of Health Diabetes Prevention Program. "It's insidious." Of the 16 million people with diabetes, only half realize they have it.
However, doctors are getting better at recognizing diabetes. In response to this growing epidemic, the ADA lowered the official fasting blood sugar number that defines diabetes from 140 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl) to 126. In addition, the ADA has also indentified a new category of troubled blood sugar, called Impaired Fasting Glucose (IFG). If your blood sugar falls in that range (110 to 125 mg/dl), you can act to lower it and at the very least remove the sting of Diabetes - those cruel complications.
Complications of Diabetes
The complications of diabetes are numerous. It is truly amazing how one disease can wreak such havoc on the body in so many ways. The mechanism of diabetes works like this: too much sugar or glucose in the body is toxic. Glucose hooks on to proteins in tissues, and then is attracted to other proteins with excess glucose. They bind to each other and eventually the blood vessels just close up.
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