The Big Picture on Diabetes
The United States has a major diabetes problem, says Judith Fradkin, MD, director of the Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Metabolic Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. In this video, she explains why, and what needs to be done.
Transcript
Diabetes is a huge problem in the United States. It's a lifetime disease.
[MUSIC PLAYING] The estimate is that one in three Americans will develop diabetes in their lifetime.
One in two minority Americans will develop diabetes in their lifetime. The time when it's so important to really intensively manage
your diabetes is really very much early in the course of the diabetes. You're going to have lifelong benefits from that.
I think, you know, somehow helping people early on is going to really, I think, be the key to longer and healthier lives for people
with diabetes. Right now, about 60% of people in the United States are either overweight or obese.
For people with type 2 diabetes, 80% are overweight or obese. So yes, it's a risk factor.
But there are people who develop type 2 diabetes who aren't overweight. I think, you know, that this whole
blaming the victim kind of thing is extremely destructive. You know, your blood sugars are generally
not as sort of unpredictable. And so for people with type 2 diabetes,
it really depends on what therapy you're taking. Now we have, for type 2 diabetes, about 12 different classes of drugs that people can take.
And so one of the things that we're really working on now is trying to figure out which drug is best for which person.
The place where I think we still have progress to make is in predicting who is at risk of the complications
for diabetes. And if we knew which of the people were more likely to develop kidney failure or blindness
or heart disease, then we would be able to more intensively treat the people who are more at risk of developing the complications of diabetes.
living with diabetes
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