Consultancy Corner: High prevalance of diabetes in youngsters

Being diagnosed with Diabetes Mellitus has a deep and long-lasting effect on the patients. Early-onset Diabetes/ Insulin-dependent Diabetes/Diabetes Mellitus Type 1, which often occurs in children and teenagers represent their premier experience of disease.

Even in adults, diabetes brings along a wave of other complications – cardiovascular diseases, diseases related to the eyes, frequent non-healing injuries, to name a few. The most challenging task is to cope with the knowledge that diabetes is now curable. If not curtailed, then it can be a life-long slow killer.

Type-2 diabetes is caused due to lifestyle factors and is now commonly found in young generation and has increasing impact with increasing of the patient and disease. The sooner one becomes diabetic, the more the chance of getting its complications, like – complications and severity of diabetes are directly proportional to its chronicity. And this happens when the sugars are uncontrolled.

The control of sugars is an ongoing process like our life and breathing cycle, so our endurance for normal sugars must be constant. Once a labelled diabetic always a labelled diabetic! But a labelled diabetic is classified as controlled and uncontrolled.

A controlled diabetic can hold the progression of the complications while an uncontrolled diabetic does not have it. Hence, whether we experience Type I or Type II diabetes, most important is to be a controlled diabetic. The other most important notion to be corrected is that diabetes is no more an incurable sugar disease, but it is a disease of excessive eating and it can be completely controlled and cured. According to the recent data from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the prevalence of diabetes was highest in Chandigarh followed by Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Jharkhand.

They claim that an equal gender distribution of diabetes mellitus took place in which more incidences occurred with lower educational status and more in occupations with physical labour. The incidence of pre-diabetic, diabetics, uncontrolled diabetics and metabolic syndrome was higher in urban population than in rural. The incidence of diabetes mellitus increased with increasing age.