| Diabetes Explanation 11-21-99 A new study has shown that exercise can greatly reduce any genetic inclination we may have inherited toward developing Diabetes.. Experts estimate that six out of every 100 women suffer from diabetes. And at least one-third of these women don’t know they have the disease. All too often women aren’t diagnosed until they develop serious complications, such as heart disease or vision problems, says Dr. Robin Goland, co-director of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. TWO TYPES Diabetes comes in two forms. Both involve problems with insulin, a hormone that helps the body stash various nutrients in cells. You can look at insulin as the finger that pushes the button on the gas pump. It doesn’t actually pump the gas, it just turns on the machine that sucks the gas out of the tank and into your car. If there’s no insulin telling the cells to pick up sugars, fats and a host of other nutrients, you’ll just waste away. If there’s too little insulin, or if your body doesn’t use insulin effectively, a condition called insulin resistance, sugar just accumulates in the blood. And while high blood sugar levels don’t make you feel bad, they are toxic to many of the body’s systems Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that destroys the body’s ability to produce insulin. Although it is usually diagnosed in young people, it can crop up in older adults. Thus the term juvenile diabetes is a misnomer, experts say. People with Type 1 diabetes must take insulin shots to live. The more common form of the disease, Type 2, usually develops in adulthood. It is a disorder caused by either the body’s inability to make enough, or to effectively use, insulin. Ultimately it is diagnosed when there is too much glucose in your blood. This form of the disease accounts for 90 to 95 percent of diabetes cases. While people inherit a tendency to develop Type 2 diabetes, experts believe that it is often inactivity and obesity that trigger the disease. ON THE RISE That’s why diabetes is on the rise in this country, says Linda Siminerio, director of the Diabetes Institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. In fact, Siminerio says, Type 2 diabetes among adolescent girls is growing at an incredible rate because these teens are spending less and less time exercising. When we accumulate too much fat, our bodies become insulin resistant and we end up with skyrocketing glucose levels, Goland says. If you have a genetic predisposition, being as little as 20 percent over your ideal weight can sometimes cause blood sugar to shoot up. This means, for example, that if your ideal weight is 120 pounds and you gain 24, you may end up with dangerously high blood sugar. But even if you are overweight, exercise can help, according to a study published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That study, which followed more than 70,000 female nurses for 12 years, found that exercise - even if it was just walking - could protect a woman against diabetes. The women who worked out the most were half as likely to develop diabetes as those who eschewed exercise. Even when the researchers factored out the weight-lowering effects of exercise, it still reduced the risk of diabetes. That’s because muscles at work are able to take up sugar directly from the bloodstream without any signals from insulin, explains Dr. David A. Simmons, an associate professor of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. When muscles cells are inactive, they need insulin to turn on the pump. So, if you exercise, your insulin goes a lot further, Simmons says. All of this has me worried. Even though I run 18 miles a week, don’t have any close relatives who were diagnosed with diabetes and I’m not in any of the ethnic groups known to be at a higher risk - African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders - |
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