Obstructive sleep apnea is one of the most common complications of diabetes, especially among people who are overweight. A recent study of 306 obese people with type 2 diabetes who wanted to lose weight found that more than 86 percent of them had sleep apnea.

The standard treatment for sleep apnea is wearing a CPAP machine for continuous positive airway pressure when we sleep. People who don’t control sleep apnea are much more likely to have high blood pressure, strokes, impaired quality of life, and a shorter life.

When I had sleep apnea, I was afraid that it will kill me. My sleep apnea was so severe when I did a sleep study in a hospital that they found I had 84 apneic episodes per hour. Before I wore a CPAP machine, I knew that I risked falling asleep at the wheel, as I wrote five years ago in Diabetes Wellness News. [Read more →]

For months the question has been whether we could gear up production of vaccine for the H1N1 flu virus — formerly swine flu — fast enough. Now that the first doses have reached some distribution centers this week, we have the answer to that question.

This answer leads to the next question that we all have to face. Should we get the vaccine?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, says that people “at increased risk of severe illness” most need the H1N1 vaccine. One of these groups includes people with diabetes.

This makes sense. Those of us who have diabetes can get very sick and may even have to go to a hospital. Our impaired immune system makes us more vulnerable to getting a bad case of the flu.

Just getting sick can raise our blood glucose level. Then, it can stop us from eating right, and that further affects our blood glucose. [Read more →]

Considering all the supplements that most of us take, we have surprisingly little evidence that the overwhelming majority of them do anything for us. The two biggest exceptions are vitamin D and omega-3 oil, which I have written about here.

Even with these well-tested supplements, the experts have little advice to give us. Now, however, a team of scientists from the University of Lyon in France just reported on how much of one type of omega-3 oil to take so that we can prevent heart attacks and strokes, the major complication of diabetes. This is the first study to identify how much omega-3 oil we need to promote optimal heart health.

They studied DHA or docosahexaenoic acid, which some studies suggest have more potent and beneficial effects than the other omega-3 oil that we usually take, EPA or eicosapentaenoic acid, according to their research communication in September issue of The FASEB Journal,  which the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology publishes.

Only the abstract of the study is online. But one of the study’s authors, Evelyne Véricel, was kind enough to send me the full text. [Read more →]

Preliminary research seems to show that a little known type of cholesterol might be the biggest threat to our heart health, the most severe complication of diabetes. Even worse than LDL cholesterol is something called oxycholesterol.

The 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society heard study leader Zhen-Yu Chen, Ph.D., of the Chinese University of Hong Kong point out the problems with oxycholesterol. We can expect published research to follow, but the chemical society’s Michael Bernstein tells me that, “There is no formal published paper connected to this study.”

Dr. Chen told the chemical society which foods have the highest levels of oxycholesterol. Fried and processed food — particularly fast-food — contains high amounts of oxycholesterol, he says. Avoiding them and eating a diet that is rich in antioxidants can reduce our levels of this really bad cholesterol.

Dr. Chen’s research team measured the effects of a diet high in oxycholesterol on hamsters, which scientists often substitute for humans in in cholesterol research. Cholesterol in the blood of the hamsters fed oxycholesterol rose up to 22 percent more than hamsters eating non-oxidized cholesterol. The hamsters fed oxycholesterol also had more cholesterol lining their arteries and a tendency to develop larger deposits of cholesterol. These fatty deposits increase the risk for heart attack and stroke. [Read more →]

Those of us who have diabetes and don’t get enough vitamin D can’t process cholesterol normally. It builds up in our blood vessels, increasing our risk of heart attack and stroke.

Now, however, new research has identified how low vitamin D levels link to heart disease risk and a good way to fix the problem. The solution is simply to increase our levels of vitamin D. Researchers already knew that low levels of vitamin D nearly double our risk of cardiovascular disease. Since this is the major complication of diabetes, this research takes on great importance for us.

The American Heart Association’s professional journal Circulation published the study in its August 25 issue. Only the abstract is free online. But the principal investigator, Carlos Bernal-Mizrachi, M.D., kindly sent me the full text of the research report. He is an assistant professor of endocrinology, metabolism and lipid research at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. [Read more →]

When we have a lot of belly fat, we are at greater risk of heart disease because of the inflammatory molecules that this fat produces. But a new study by scientists at the University of Illinois suggests that even moderate amounts of exercise can reduce the inflammation.

Since people with diabetes are at an especially high risk of heart disease, this is an encouraging finding for us.

The study examined the effects of diet and exercise on the inflammation of visceral fat tissue — belly fat — in mice. Maybe people will react differently, but only the sedentary mice got the inflammation that usually results from having big bellies.

“The surprise was that the combination of diet and exercise didn’t yield dramatically different and better results than diet or exercise alone,” says Victoria Vieira, a University of Illinois Ph.D. candidate and the study’s lead author. [Read more →]

The American Medical Association today published the results of a large and long study that is good news for anyone who has diabetes. The study shows that intensive control substantially lowers the risk of some serious complications of diabetes.

No surprise that intensive control works. But the surprise is how well it works.

The study followed 1,375 people with type 1 diabetes for 30 years of their diabetes. The complications measured were proliferative retinopathy, nephropathy, and cardiovascular disease. Conventional treatment led half of them to proliferative retinopathy, one-quarter to nephropathy, and 14 percent to cardiovascular disease.

Those in the intensive therapy group has substantially lower rates of these complications — 21 percent, 9 percent, and 9 percent respectively. Fewer than 1 percent became blind, required kidney replacement, or had an amputation because of diabetes during those 30 years. [Read more →]

Dental disease is a wake-up call that your diet is harming your body, concludes Dr. Philippe P. Hujoel. He reviewed the two hypotheses about whether or not dental disease is a warning that we are headed toward chronic system illness. After examining all the evidence, he concludes that it is.

“The five-alarm fire bell of a tooth ache is difficult to ignore,” Dr. Hujoel told me. He is professor of dental public health sciences at the University of Washington School of Dentistry in Seattle.

But we do tend to ignore it.

He lays the blame squarely at the feet of Ancel Keys and his believers. Dr. Keys promulgated the lipid hypothesis and focused on excess fat intake as the primary cause of systemic chronic non-communicable diseases — like diabetes. For Dr. Keys a healthy diet consisted of increasing our intake of “fermentable carbohydrates.” [Read more →]