Diabetes News

     You may be able to manage your diabetes with diet and exercise, but as you get older and/or gain weight, it will manifest itself again.  Diabetes can be a very serious disease when it is ignored or poorly managed.  How you decide to cope will have a lot to do with how well you manage your disease.  With proper care, gained through knowledge about the disease, you can delay/or prevent many complications that come from having the disease.  You must change your lifestyle somewhat, follow your treatment plan and keep appointments with the professionals.  You cannot depend solely on the professionals to  completely manage your diabetes.  Every diabetic is different so the disease does not affect everyone the same.  Your care team of professionals treat your disease, more or less generically.  They go by what you tell them and what the tests they run tells them.  None of us like the HbA1C nor fasting blood sugar tests because it tells the doctor more than we want them to know.  Most diabetics are not completely truthful with their doctors about how they are trying to manage their disease.  If your fasting blood sugar and/or HbA1C is a high number, the doctor will automatically put you on higher doses of your medications and/or insulin.  The doctor might try to talk to you about your tests and ways to bring the numbers down but you may or may not listen.  The decisions are yours to make.  You have to live with the disease and the consequences of not taking care of it so you MUST take the responsibility of managing it. 

You Must Know:

A.  Types of food to eat and not to eat.                                  
                                                                                           
B.  How much and when you can eat
                          
C.  The necessity of physical activity      
                   
D.  Diabetes medications: what they are and what they are for           
                                                     
E.  How to test and monitor blood as well as your target for blood sugar

F.  Your blood pressure targt

G.  Your weight target

H. What to do in case of an emergency such as hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia.

Different Types of Diabetes:

Insulin Dependant (type 1) diabetes is where there is absolute insulin deficiency, meaning the pancreas produces no insulin.

A Brittle Diabetic has an unpredictable variation in glucose (sugar) tolerance.  This type of diabetes is usually seen in individuals whose diabetes developed during childhood.

Non-Insulin Dependant diabetes (type 2) is where the insulin produced is insufficient to meet the
needs of the body.

Latent Diabetes manifests itself during times of stress, such as pregnancy, infectious disease, or trauma.  There is a chance these people will eventually develop diabetes.

Chemical Diabetes occurs when the various tests for altered glucose metabolism, except for the fasting blood glucose level, are abnormal, but there are no obvious clinical or symptoms of diabetes.

Endocrine Diabetes is associated with certain diseases.  This form of diabetes can be brought on by the administration of some drugs.