Saturday, September 20, 2014

Diabetes/Pre-Diabetes could be our next National Health Crisis

Americans are getting fatter, and older. These converging trends are putting the USA on the path to an alarming health crisis: Nearly half of adults have either pre-diabetes or diabetes, raising their risk of heart attacks, blindness, amputations and cancer.
Federal health statistics show that 12.3% of Americans 20 and older have diabetes, either diagnosed or undiagnosed. Another 37% have pre-diabetes, a condition marked by higher-than-normal blood sugar. That's up from 27% a decade ago. An analysis of 16 studies involving almost 900,000 people worldwide, published in the current issue of the journal Diabetologia, shows pre-diabetes not only sets the stage for diabetes but also increases the risk of cancer by 15%.
Tabitha Jordan puts in a 6 a.m. workout at the YMCA on most
days. Jordan has reformed her body out of its once "pre-diabetic"
 status.(Photo: Marty Pearl, The Louisville Courier-Journal)
"It's bad everywhere," says Philip Kern, director of the Barnstable Brown Diabetes and Obesity Center at the University of Kentucky. "You almost have the perfect storm of an aging population and a population growing more obese, plus fewer reasons to move and be active, and fast food becoming more prevalent."
Tabitha Jordan of Louisville says she was eating poorly, struggling to find time for exercise and packing on pounds when her doctor diagnosed pre-diabetes in October. She recognized the danger; she'd seen her mother go blind, lose toes and eventually die from diabetes complications at age 63.
"It was kind of like, 'It's time for me to do something,' " says Jordan, 47. "I knew things had to change."
Doctors and experts coined the name pre-diabetes in the late 1990s, replacing less worrisome terms such as "borderline diabetes" that didn't convey the seriousness of the condition. Without lifestyle changes, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says up to 30% of people with pre-diabetes develop Type 2 diabetes within five years.
Pre-diabetes often has no symptoms; it's found through blood tests. But most of the time it remains undiagnosed. The CDC says about 10% of the 86 million afflicted adults know they have it.
Read the rest of the story HERE.

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