HowToPreventHeartDisease.com

Why Is Early Detection of Diabetes Important?
 

Diabetes Mellitus, or diabetes in short, is a condition in which a person has high blood sugar level. Type-1, Type-2 and Gestational diabetes are the 3 main types of diabetes.

Type-1 diabetes occurs when one’s body fails to produce insulin. As it is frequently diagnosed in children and young adults, it was previously known as juvenile diabetes. Type-2 diabetes results either from insulin resistance, a condition in which the cells cannot use insulin properly, or when the body does not produce sufficient insulin. Gestational diabetes happens to women, who have never had diabetes before, have a high blood sugar level during their pregnancy.

Every year, gestational diabetes has been found in about 4 percent of all pregnant women in the United States and only 5 to 10 percent of diabetics are classified as Type-1 diabetes. Being the most common type of diabetes, Type-2 diabetes affects millions of Americans and about 250 million people worldwide.

People diagnosed with diabetes can develop many other complications including amputation, blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, hypertension, skin disease and stroke. In some serious cases, patients even ended with death. In fact, diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in Singapore.

Type-2 diabetes is closely related to obesity. The shift from traditional diet to junk and processed foods has made it becoming one of the most popular diseases in both developed and developing countries. It used to affect only adults but now also many obese adolescents. According to the forecast by the International Diabetes Federation, the number of Type-2 diabetics will increase to 380 million by 2025, and many of them will be adolescents.

Detection of diabetes is not easy without screening because many of the symptoms seem so harmless. Many diabetics are unaware that they are at high risk. Therefore, early detection of symptoms and treatment on diabetes is paramount.
Aggressive insulin treatment or lifestyle changes at the beginning of diabetes would definitely decrease the likelihood of developing the various complications. It would also lead to better quality of life for the patients. 2 studies that were published in the British journal The Lancet on May 23, 2008 could confirm such argument.

Researchers from Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China argued that if intensive insulin therapy through daily injections is adopted before the body loses its ability to control sugar levels in the blood, patients could recover normal levels faster and are less likely to have remission.

Nearly 400 patients aged between 25 and 70 with Type-2 diabetes were divided into 3 groups. 2 of the groups received intensive insulin therapy while the third one was only given standard oral diabetic drugs. Once the regular blood sugar control had been restored for 2 weeks, the researchers stopped all the treatments and patients regulated their glucose level through diet and exercise.

More patients in the first 2 groups (insulin-intensive therapy) had their blood sugar level restored to normal and they also achieve this faster, in 4 to 6 days rather than 9 days in the last group. Meanwhile, the remission rate of patients in the third group was found to be nearly twice as high in the first 2 groups.

In a separate study, scientists from Guangwei Li of the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing showed that a controlled diet and exercise over 6 years prevented or delayed diabetes onset by up to an additional 14 years. They also found that a monitored diet coupled with physical activity could cut the occurrence of diabetes by half during the 6 years of intervention, and by 43 percent over 20 years.

Copyright 2007-2012 © HowToPreventHeartDisease.com . All Rights Reserved.d.......
Created by EpublishingVault.com
Heart Disease Prevention - 8 Simple Ways You Can Do Immediately