Prevention of Diabetes

It is currently believed that around 57 million people in the US have what’s known as “prediabetes”. It means their blood sugars are elevated toward the diabetic range but they have yet to be diagnosed with the disease. This number is twice the number of individuals who already have been diagnosed with diabetes—around 26 million people. These are huge numbers of people who are

at risk for many of the side effects and diseases that diabetes causes. Many do not know they have the disease.

Some people don’t know they have diabetes until they suffer a complication. In fact, half of all diabetics have a complication at the time they are diagnosed with the disease. The diabetes does not develop overnight and there are plenty of opportunities for screening for the disease and preventing diabetes before it becomes serious. The complications, however, are not reversible so if you don’t catch it early enough, you can have complications you have to live with for the rest of your life.

The treatment of diabetes is not cheap. In fact, it costs around 174 billion dollars in the US per year to manage the direct and indirect costs of treating diabetes. It costs twice as much per year to care for a diabetic patient than it takes a non-diabetic patient. Diabetes is one of the most expensive diseases to treat in today’s time.

The first step in cutting back on the costs of treating diabetes is to prevent the disease as much as possible. Finding people who are just insulin resistant and teaching them proper ways of eating and exercise can cut down on a great many of the costs. And exercise is much more important in the treatment of diabetes than you’d think. The lack of exercise is one reason why people develop diabetes in the first place. Overeating and not exercising is why 80 percent of people get diabetes.

The truth, however, is that just asking people to eat better and exercise more practically speaking can’t prevent diabetes from occurring. People are unwilling to change their lifestyle habits and it will take considerable alteration in the lifestyles of the populace as a whole in order to make any difference in the incidence of diabetes.

It takes about ten years from the time someone gets insulin resistance until full blown diabetes occurs. If practitioners can identify the amount of insulin put forth by the pancreas instead of just looking at blood sugar levels, it may make a greater difference in the number of people who get diabetes in the future.