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Type 2 Diabetes Affects In Excess Of Fifty Million Americans
By: Donald Saunders
Type 2 diabetes, which represents about ninety-five percent of all cases of diabetes and affects over 50,000,000 Americans, is mainly seen in adults over 40 years of age. Nowadays, however, it is also being found increasingly at younger ages, and even in very young children.
Type 2 diabetes symptoms are often reasonably mild in the early stages and you can suffer from type 2 diabetes for many years before it is diagnosed. However, diabetes is a potentially serious condition and undiagnosed type 2 diabetes can result in a variety of serious complications including blindness, renal failure, the inability of wounds to heal and coronary artery disease.
Estimates indicate that about one in five adults over 65 in the US suffers from type 2 diabetes. The condition is more prominent amongst, Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans and Non-Hispanic Whites and is somewhat more common in older women than in men.
The origin of type 2 diabetes is a mystery and, while it is said that there is a genetic basis to the disease there is a lot less evidence for this than is found for type 1 diabetes. Evidence does however clearly show that environmental factors play a large role in the development of type 2 diabetes and this is particularly true when it comes to obesity, a lack of exercise and a sedentary lifestyle.
Many people believe that type 1 and type 2 diabetes are identical and that the difference lies simply in the name, with type 1 diabetes referring to the disease in childhood and type 2 diabetes referring to the disease in adults. However, this is not the case and, while there are a number of similarities, type 1 and type 2 diabetes are quite different conditions and require very different types of treatment.
With type 1 diabetes the body is unable to produce insulin, which is essential for the transfer of glucose (the primary source of energy within the body) from the blood into the cells of the body. With type 2 diabetes the difficulty is not that the body cannot produce insulin but that the body develops a resistance to insulin.
There is presently no cure for type 2 diabetes which is a chronic condition and treatment is thus designed to manage the disease to reduce the frequency of complications several of which can be life-threatening. Treatment is also designed to maintain the best possible quality of life for the patient.
In the first instant, patients with type 2 diabetes are treated using a carefully tailored program of diet and exercise (including a weight loss plan where this is necessary) and this can prove very effective in controlling levels of glucose within the blood and can frequently improve a patient's sensitivity to insulin considerably. If this treatment does not prove to be successful, or in cases in which the disease progresses, it is usually treated using a range of medication.
Article Source: http://www.ezarticles.info
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