Diabetes Complications

Are you like most of the people who have diabetes? If you are, you probably don’t regularly have a dilated eye exam.

But if you knew that this exam could help prevent 95 percent of diabetes-related vision loss, would you do that?

The National Eye Institute, which is a part of the federal government’s National Institute of Health, tells us that early detection and treatment can reduce the risk of blindness by 95 percent. Diabetic retinopathy can lead to blindness if you don’t get it treated on time.

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You probably haven’t got your flu shot yet, and you may not be planning to get one this year. But skipping the shot could be a deadly mistake for someone who has diabetes.

A large population-based study of 124,503 adults in the UK who have Type 2 diabetes found that those who got a flu vaccine had a 24 percent lower death rate than those who didn’t get vaccinated. Flu vaccinations also resulted in a 30 percent reduction in hospital admissions for stroke and a 22 percent reduction in heart failure admissions.

Researchers from Imperial College London used one of the world’s largest computerized medical databases of primary care records, the Clinical Practice Research Datalink in England. They studied the results for seven flu seasons between 2003 and 2010 and reported their findings in CMAJ in July 2016.

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Your intimate relationships can suffer when you have diabetes. But it’s not inevitable.

Challenges to sexual performance remain a taboo subject for many people, even as sex itself has come out of the bedroom and our culture has become increasingly sex obsessed. Consequently, you may be reluctant to discuss your concerns with a date, a partner, or even with a healthcare provider.

Those of us who have diabetes tend to accept, albeit reluctantly, that we have or may get the physical complications that can come with it. Yet we too often try to hide the emotional complications that can be equally devastating to satisfactory intimate relationships.

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Foot ulcers can have an their early warning system, and this is probably the only good thing about them. When one of these ulcers are developing developing, it may not be obvious even to a doctor. But it will likely be a warmer spot on your foot.

To take advantage of this warning, a new medical system uses temperature data to predict that an ulcer will develop more than a month before it surfaces. With this system, doctors would have more time to treat it.

Foot ulcers can follow neuropathy, which 60 to 70 percent of people with diabetes have. But neuropathy is not an inevitable consequence of diabetes.

“The best way to prevent neuropathy is to keep blood glucose levels as close to the normal range as possible,” the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases states. “Maintaining safe blood glucose levels protects nerves throughout the body.”

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If having heart failure or getting a stroke or dying soon are the only diabetes risks that concern you, then you don’t need to start managing your diabetes right away. But if you would rather not get diabetic retinopathy, diabetic nephropathy, or diabetic neuropathy, you may want to get down to a normal blood glucose level right after your doctor diagnoses it.

This is the good news/bad news summary of a study by researchers at the University of Chicago’s Department of Medicine and colleagues at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. They presented their findings in late breaking abstract 184-LB, “Early Glycemic Control after Type 2 Diabetes Diagnosis Is Most Critical for Future Health and Survival,” at the American Diabetes Association recent convention, the world’s largest annual meeting of diabetes professionals.

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