Diet, Drugs & Exercise Factors In Controlling Adult Onset Diabetes
American Diabetes Association says many adults don’t know they have the disease.
As baby boomers rock and remote-control into middle age, the leading cause of end-stage kidney disease is increasing more rapidly than it’s being diagnosed. Adult-onset diabetes is most likely to strike overweight people, past their 45th birthdays, who exercise little beyond getting in and out of the car.
Nearly 16 million Americans have adult-onset (type 2) diabetes, says the American Diabetes Association. About 5 1/2 million of them don’t know it, which is why the ADA has distributed millions of quick risk assessment questionnaires to businesses and other organizations for Diabetes Alert Da.. People are definitely getting it at a younger age. The average baby boomer with type 2 diabetes was diagnosed at 37, compared with 54 for their parents’ generation, according to a survey sponsored by the manufacturer of a drug for diabetes.
Incidence of the disease has tripled since 1990, with little hope of slowing down in a country where more than one-third of adults are overweight. And those numbers don’t factor in last year’s reduction of the diagnostic threshold for diabetes, from a fasting level of 140 milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood to 126.
They lowered the numbers so they could treat people earlier when they were on the verge of having it.
Early detection can reduce such complications as amputations, kidney disease, blindness and heart disease by as much as 50 to 75 percent.
Diabetes can be treated with exercise, diet changes and medications, says the ADA, including insulin injections in about 40 percent of type 2 diabetics.
Insulin is the hormone that converts blood sugar into energy. Type 1 (juvenile) diabetics can’t produce insulin, but type 2 diabetics either aren’t generating enough or cannot effectively use what they do produce.
The theory is that a lot of what we put into our system by eating improperly taxes our systems too much. The high blood-sugar levels that result then weaken blood vessels, making extremities, eyes and kidneys particularly vulnerable to damage.
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