Alzheimer's Disease by Mary T. Newport MD

Author:Mary T. Newport, MD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Health Publications

DIABETES MELLITUS

Diabetes mellitus is a group of conditions that involves a problem with the way the body metabolizes glucose; specifically, the levels of glucose in the blood are abnormally high, although the reasons for this differ. Diabetes is one of the most common chronic conditions, affecting nearly 26 million people in the United States, or 8.3 percent of the population, according to the National Diabetes Fact Sheet 2011 from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention. In addition, an astounding 79 million people, or one in four, have prediabetes, meaning that levels of glucose are elevated but not quite to the levels of those seen in diabetes. People with prediabetes are at high risk of developing diabetes but can often avoid this by close attention to diet and exercise.

Diabetes becomes more common as we age, affecting about 3.7 percent of people between twenty and forty-four and gradually increasing to nearly 27 percent of people who are sixty-five or older. Also, about half the U.S. population sixty-five and older have prediabetes, therefore more than three-quarters of the people in this age group either have diabetes or are at high risk of developing diabetes.

People with diabetes mellitus often develop other chronic conditions: it is the leading cause of kidney failure, representing about 44 percent of cases, and is also the leading cause of new cases of blindness in people between the ages of twenty and seventy-four. In addition, people with diabetes are at greater-than-normal risk of developing high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke, as well as damage to the nervous system, such as impaired sensation or pain in the extremities, skin breakdown, and difficulty with wound healing. The brain is affected as well—the diabetic is more likely to develop dementia than the nondiabetic (Akomolafe, 2006; Pasquier, 2006).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.