The Increasing Cost for Diabetes Care a Source of Concern

The finding that Qatar’s annual cost for diabetes care could increase from QR1.8bn in 2015 to QR5bn in 2035 and QR8.4bn by 2055, if no immediate action is delivered to combat the condition, is usually a matter of concern, going through a report presented with the International Diabetes Leadership Forum held recently in Doha.The net present cost for treating diabetes in the next 4 decades is estimated at QR130bn. The report also highlights that if current behaviour and practices stay the same, there will probably be a significant spurt from the burden from the disease within the coming decades.If few things are done to fight the condition, the amount of people experiencing diabetes in Qatar might go up from 200,000 in 2015 to 299,000 in 2035 and 368,000 by 2055. Similarly, how many people affected by complications because of diabetes is 48,000 presently and may even rise to 124,000 in 2035 and 182,000 by 2055.It was also pointed out in the Forum that diabetes is assuming tsunami proportions within the Eastern Mediterranean countries, particularly inside Gulf region. More than 422mn everyone is diabetic inside the world and unfortunately, the Gulf region has seen the very best increase in this regard, based on International Diabetes Federation president Dr Shaukat Sadikot. “Half of these consumers are not even conscious they are diabetic,” he stated while warning that diabetes is really a tsunami today and also the waves are getting higher far better.Addressing the opening session HE the Minister of Public Health Dr Hanan Mohamed al-Kuwari observed that diabetes is one in the fastest growing diseases from the world and Qatar will never be spared because of this trend. She brought up that one in six (17%) from the Qatari adult population has diabetes leading to QR1.8bn is spent for treating diabetes as well as its complications from the country.As reminded because of the minister, about 50% of most dialysis provided in Qatar is as a result of diabetes, one half of acute heart problems is associated with diabetes and in close proximity to 70% of most stroke patients have diabetes or pre-diabetes. The projections demonstrate that without any change, the quantity of people experiencing diabetes may well double from the next 4 decades.As urged from the minister, collective attempts are needed to fight diabetes. The greatest challenge – and also the biggest opportunity – is usually to work together to change the way we address preventing the disease inside the first place.According to the minister, Qatar’s National Diabetes Strategy 2016-2022 provides a real possiblity to focus a persons vision on one with the most important health challenges for Qatar. It was also announced how the Ministry of Public Health was preparing to implement in Qatar, National Guidelines for Diabetic Patient Care, that will specify different stages and methods of treatment to manage the condition and avoid complications in the effective way.Lifestyle changes have a massive affect diabetes – physical exercise, a comprehensive diet and stopping smoking are simply a few with the steps people will take to significantly reduce their probabilities of getting the condition.

» Read More...

A Better Diabetes Test?

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 5, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- Industry-funded researchers say they've designed a way to improve accuracy of any standard diabetes test.

"We think our approach will enable many patients in addition to their doctors to perform a better job controlling sugar levels and reduce the long-term perils of heart attack, stroke, blindness and kidney failure" linked to diabetes, said Dr. John Higgins, associate professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

At concern is the HbA1c test, often known as the A1c test, currently in use to diagnose diabetes. It also identifies those with prediabetes and offers insight into how well blood glucose is controlled spanning a three-month period the type of monitoring their disease.

The A1c test "measures simply how much sugar someone's blood cells have consumed since the time cellular structure were produced," Higgins said.

"Before quality was available, patients and clinicians only knew what ones current glucose levels level was. But effective treatments for diabetes is determined by knowing what the blood glucose level has been considering that the previous checkup," Higgins explained. "The HbA1c test provided the 1st available estimate of the patient's blood glucose level in the last several weeks."

For countless diabetics worldwide, the A1c test forms the premise of their treatment. In the United States alone, greater than 29 million Americans have diabetes, in accordance with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The test is usually inaccurate, however. How much that matters can be debate.

Higgins said the errors are significant. But another specialist, Dr. Joel Zonszein, said quality is rarely inaccurate and "is a fantastic test for that great majority" of patients.

"Patients with diabetes could be properly monitored and given the tools we've got," said Zonszein, director of clinical diabetes at Albert Einstein College of Medicine's University Hospital in New York City.

"In my experience, the main dilemma is that individuals with diabetes don't often check their A1c values," said Zonszein, who wasn't associated with the new research.

For the modern study, Higgins with his fantastic colleagues used a high level mathematical formula, or algorithm, to analyze glucose levels through the HbA1c test.

This enabled the scientists to be the cause of variations from the age of blood cells among folks, Higgins said. Hemoglobin in red blood cells accumulates sugar after some time, and is particularly a major basis for differences in test results, he was quoted saying.

In in excess of 200 patients included within the study, Higgins said the modern approach reduced significant errors from about one out of three to about one out of 10. These were errors just right to affect treatment decisions, he was quoted saying.

Since those with diabetes frequently get A1c tests every 90 days, Higgins said the brand new approach could boost their monitoring and treatment.

Higgins declined to estimate the amount of it would cost to add the brand new calculations to existing tests. But he anticipates the additional expense could well be less than the money necessary for the A1c test itself. And in defense of the higher pricing, he added, "diabetes becomes very costly if blood sugar are not well-controlled."

The study was funded from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Abbott Diagnostics, an organization that develops laboratory lab tests. The study authors, including Higgins, are listed as inventors using a patent application connected to the findings.

What's next?

Higgins said the study are looking for partnerships that could allow labs to utilize the algorithm to further improve HbA1c testing.

Zonszein said the analysis findings appear valid, although algorithm "has not been challenged and/or weighed against other possible mathematical models."

For now, however, "this is research, which is not a practical model that should be implemented," he stated.

The study appears from the Oct. 5 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

More information

For more about glucose levels tests, start to see the American Diabetes Association.

» Read More...

Job Insecurity Bound to Increased Likelihood of Diabetes

A paramedic checks the blood sugar levels level of the patient at SS Diabetes Care clinic in Jakarta © REUTERS/Beawiharta A paramedic checks the blood glucose levels level of the patient at SS Diabetes Care clinic in Jakarta (Reuters Health) - People who are concerned about losing their jobs could possibly be more likely to be informed they have diabetes, in line with a new analysis.

Compared to folks who felt secure inside their jobs, those who were experiencing so-called job insecurity experienced a 19 percent higher rate of brand new cases of diabetes, which researchers known as the "modest increased risk."

The study can't prove that job insecurity causes diabetes. Still, said lead author Jane Ferrie, "In an excellent world, the type of thing I’d enjoy visiting come out of these studies is a lowering of job insecurity with an increase in secure job contracts and reasonable wages."

About one inch 10 adults have diabetes, based on the World Health Organization. Most have diabetes type 2 symptoms, which takes place when the body can’t make or process consequently the hormone insulin.

For the revolutionary analysis, Ferrie, from the University of Bristol and University College London inside the U.K., and colleagues compiled data from 19 studies involving an overall of 140,825 adults inside the U.S., Australia and Europe have been employed and diabetes free whenever they enrolled inside the studies.

At the outset, participants were asked as long as they were frightened of losing their jobs inside the near future. Depending on the research, from 6 percent to forty percent of respondents said yes, they did fear for his or her jobs.

Over another 10 years, normally, the annual rate of brand new diabetes cases inside the studies ranged from about 9 for each 10,000 participants to about 85 for each and every 10,000.

People who reported job insecurity at the beginning from the study were 19 percent more prone to be told they have diabetes through the follow-up period, after taking age and sex note, in accordance with the report in CMAJ.

When the study restricted their analysis to your 15 studies with data on factors apart from age and sex that will influence ones risk, job insecurity was still associated with a 12 percent higher likelihood of being told they have diabetes.

The new analysis fills a gap, Ferrie and colleagues suggest. Job insecurity had been linked with higher body mass index (BMI), a pace of weight with regards to height. Past studies also discovered that people experiencing job insecurity had an increased chance of heart attacks and deaths associated with heart problems.

A high BMI is risk factor for diabetes, which in turn is often a risk factor for heart related illnesses.

Job-related stress could cause people to overeat and overindulge in other unhealthy behaviors, and stress hormones can directly promote putting on weight as well, these all could promote increased risk for diabetes.

Individuals mustn't be too concerned around the findings, however, since case study looked at diabetes risk across a considerable group of people, Ferrie told Reuters Health. "This certainly won't tell any person about their risk."

"We need to have a population health approach and reduce people's contact job insecurity," she said.

But the brand new study is one thing to keep in mind for anyone facing job insecurity - especially individuals who are already at dangerous for diabetes, like men and women that are overweight and ladies who temporarily developed diabetes while being pregnant, said Edwin Torres, of Montefiore Health System in New York City.

"This can be a phenomenon I’ve viewed as a provider and within the literature," said Torres, who has been not involved with the brand new study, but is usually a nurse practitioner completing his PhD about the subject at Binghamton University in New York.

"If you lose your task or have job insecurity, ensure that you're exercising," he was quoted saying.

» Read More...

First Indication That Job Insecurity Raises Risk for Diabetes

Individuals living underneath the threat of unemployment and/or on variable incomes produce an increased chance developing diabetes, separate from other factors, reveals a whole new meta-analysis that underlines the role of chronic experience anxiety and stress inside pathogenesis on the disease.

This could be the first time that job insecurity per se is independently associated with likelihood of diabetes.

Studying data on almost 150,000 individuals from six countries, the c's found that the chance diabetes was increased by almost 20% among people who have self-identified high degrees of job insecurity.

The research, by Jane Ferrie, PhD, on the department of epidemiology and public health, University College London, and also the School of Community and Social Medicine, University of Bristol, United Kingdom, and colleagues was published online October 3 in CMAJ.

Dr Ferrie noted that job insecurity can be a growing problem and changes at the public-health level to reduce contact the stress this produces. In the meantime, doctors should be aware men and women facing job insecurity are in increased chance of diabetes.

Discussing potential mechanisms, she told Medscape Medical News, "We do not know enough to decide" whether the worries of job insecurity causes poor lifestyle choices or regardless of if the diabetes can be a direct result on the body's stress responses.

The anxiety of job insecurity might also manifest itself as poor sleep, that is itself related to an increased chance of type 2 diabetes, possibly caused by glucose dysregulation, while previous research indicates that stress can provide an impact for the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, she added. "So I think the anxiety connected with job insecurity may well be contributing in a number of ways to the biological mechanisms."

Nevertheless, Dr Ferrie questioned the clinical utility of examining the mechanisms underlying the association between job insecurity and incident diabetes, instead preferring to concentrate on what can be done to relieve the risk.

"I think research into mechanisms can be quite useful, but…that doesn't solve the challenge. It's very interesting for many people academics, but I'm not sure who's does anything very much inside the real world" with regard to how best to intervene, she added.
First Report of Job Insecurity Association With Diabetes

Noting that job insecurity has previously been regarding a subsequent rise in body mass index but that your link with diabetes wasn't explored previously within the literature, Dr Ferrie and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of eight cohort studies from open-access data archives and 11 studies from the same design in the Individual-Participant-Data Meta-analysis in Working Populations (IPD-Work) Consortium.

They gathered data on 44,770 women and men on the eight open-access studies plus a further 96,066 individuals in the 11 IPD-Work Consortium who have been of working age, in employment, freed from diabetes at baseline, as well as for whom complete job-security data were available.

The mean age with the overall population in excess of 140,000 individuals was 42.couple of years, as well as the studies were conducted in Australia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, plus the United States.

There were 3954 incident cases of diabetes on the mean follow-up of 9.4 years, with a mean incidence through the 19 studies of 9.0 to 85.2 per 10,000 person-years. The prevalence of self-reported high job insecurity ranged from 6.3% to 40.3%. Type of diabetes hasn't been specified.

Adjusting for age and sex, the c's found that high job insecurity was linked to a significantly increased chance incident diabetes compared to low job insecurity, with an adjusted odds ratio of just one.19.

Further adjustment for age, sex, socioeconomic status, obesity, exercise, alcohol, and smoking reduced the association between high job insecurity and incident diabetes, nevertheless it remained significant, with an odds ratio of merely one.12.

Restricting the analysis to high-quality studies the location where the diabetes diagnosis was created from electronic records or clinical examination failed to affect the strength on the association, with an odds ratio of merely one.19. Nor did stratifying the studies by approach to diabetes diagnosis, study quality, age, sex, socioeconomic status, and skim location.

There had also been low to moderate heterogeneity involving the study-specific estimates, at I2 = 27% (P = .2).
The Stress of Not Knowing

Dr Ferrie said the tension of job insecurity is a result of financial concerns about variable income and absence of control and it is becoming of skyrocketing importance in high-income countries because of greater using temporary contracts, zero-hours contracts, along with forms of flexible employment.

"If you're employed on a zero-hours contract, it effectively means altogether idea what your wages is going to be a week."

But ways of try to lessen this stress will help. If landlords, mortgage providers, and utility suppliers, for instance, would accept variable payments month after month, perhaps one way that could aid "people to scale back their a higher level anxiety about losing their job or which has a zero-hour's contract," she observed.

"A great deal of people…have lives where it doesn't have to worry about these types of things and think there's a large amount of emphasis about people taking responsibility for everything for the individual level," she continued.

But "that's super easy to say if you're not anyone who's sitting in your house waiting to discover the call. I think it's asking the impossible to state that people couldn't survive worried about using a very variable income with regards to families as well as just for themselves."

Therefore, healthcare providers should be aware in the association with diabetes among workers reporting job insecurity, plus the issue also need to be tackled by policies on the population level, she concluded.

The IPD-Work Consortium is sustained by Nord-Forsk, the Nordic Programon Health and Welfare; the EU New OSH ERA Research Program (funded from the Finnish Work Environment Fund; the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare; the German Social Accident Insurance; along with the Danish National Research Center for that Working Environment); the Academy of Finland; along with the Bupa UK Foundation. The authors report no relevant financial relationships.

» Read More...

Diabetes Reducer: Diabetes Awareness Should Begin with Medical Professionals - Angela's Blog

Recently, I�ve changed medical teams. The free clinic we had in town has closed shop, and I now must attend the local sliding scale fee clinic. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, I may receive affordable health insurance � but as I still have a lot of past medical bills � I am blackballed from attending the local major medical complex, which has a monopoly of care in town. This is a reality for many people living with chronic health conditions and in need of balancing financial obligations and supporting a spouse or a family. I don�t have children � but I support my spouse, who also has diabetes.
This means I really don�t have much of a choice in who I see to help manage my diabetes, while I slowly chip away at those bills. It means I must deal with whatever else there is � and often that means people who have a limited health knowledge base, but the ego of a specialist. And I hate talking to those kinds of people. They can never be wrong about anything � and don�t you try to correct them. 
(Continued at Type2Diabetes.Com)

» Read More...

Diabetes Reducer: Diabetes Awareness Begins � What that Means for Me - Angela's Blog


November is a bitter-sweet month for me. I am, at once, full of the spirit of advocacy and full of the knowing self-awareness that I have lived exactly six years with this disease. I look over my own body, as if taking inventory of its various parts. For a woman with a lot of freckles, this can sometimes border on hypochondria and paranoia. Ultimately, I suppose� I am scared of what may come, but I am also thankful that I am still healthy to enjoy friends and family, festivities and the occasional piece of leftover Halloween candy.

November is also like one of those Halloween ghost stories, for me � the ones where people claim an apparition repeats the same �ritual� over and over again. The one where she again, clamors for awareness of her condition, and then remembers how her happy moment came tumbling down by that other moment that changed her fate � that moment of diagnosis.
November 11th is my birthday.
November 14th is World Diabetes Awareness Day
November 17th is my diagnosis day.
So why is diabetes advocacy so important to me?
(Continue on to Type2Diabetes.com to read the rest.)

» Read More...

Diabetes Reducer: CrossFit Resorts to Bullying People with Diabetes - Angela's Blog

So recently, the people at CrossFit have started a new campaign insinuating sugar (and namely, Coca-Cola) kill people and give them diabetes. Their distasteful tweet went out to say...


This is the height of DISGUSTING morals and disrespect for a people with a poorly understood health condition, massive misinformation, and families and relatives who have passed away! As someone who lost her father to type 2 diabetes in 2003, I am deeply offended!

I do not just appeal to you to write CrossFit, as these people are surely not going to give a DAMN about what we have to say -- but hit them in the pockets with a potential lawsuit by writing Coca-Cola. Together, we can fight back. This is my letter. Modify as you need to... You may submit yours at https://secure.coca-colacompany.com/ssldocs/mail/eQuery_product.shtml. (Copy and paste in your browser).

"To Whom It May Concern,

I am an advocate for people with diabetes. It has recently come to my attention, and the attention of many other advocates and persons with diabetes that a certain company calling itself "CrossFit" has appropriated part of Coca-Cola's logo and good name as a means to attack and tarnish the reputations of people with type 2 diabetes, as a part of their scare tactic campaign and dissemination of misinformation.

As advocates, we work endlessly with other agencies such as the American Diabetes Association, JDRF, and the Joslin Diabetes Center to educate persons on the nature of diabetes, its various types, and any means of prevention possible. While we recognize that good nutrition is key to maintaining a healthy weight, we strongly denounce the tactics of this company. Consuming sugar in and of itself does NOT lead to any form of diabetes.

This campaign is deeply offensive to people with diabetes, and our voices are being ignored by this company. We would like to appeal to Coca Cola and their good name, to help us stand against this company -- not only because this is hurtful for people with diabetes, but because it damages the good name and brand of Coca Cola and its affiliates.

At this time, the "Crossfit" company is using parts of the Coca Cola logo, with an attached catchphrase of "open diabetes" which they claim is trademarked.

The information is being spread all over Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and may be seen at these links:

https://instagram.com/p/4hHG9htDUL/
https://twitter.com/CrossFit/status/615539464232902656

Thank you for your time, and we hope to hear from you soon.
Lizmari M. Collazo

Diabetes Advocate and Freelance Writer
http://theangrytype2diabetic.blogspot.com/"

» Read More...

Blog Archive

Labels