Diabetes-Related Complications, Plus What You Can Do to Stop Them
About 30 million Americans have diabetes, but complications are declining. In this video, neurologist Sanjay Gupta, MD and endocrinologist Guillermo E. Umpierrez, MD discuss complications, like blindness and kidney failure.
Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING] Hey, Anthony. Hey, Dr. U. How you doing?
How are you? SANJAY GUPTA: Anthony McBride is 54. He's been living with diabetes for almost 12 years.
GUILLERMO UMPIERREZ: Tell me about your medications. You're taking insulin every day. Yes, I am. At what time? SANJAY GUPTA: For 10 of those years,
he's been seeing Dr. Guillermo Umpierrez, head of the diabetes clinic at Grady hospital in Atlanta, and a leading expert on diabetes at Emory University.
Someone like Anthony, when you're talking to them the first time and outlining this stuff, what is the reaction, typically?
Do you get the sense that people are motivated to at least try? What is interesting about Anthony is that he had a very good diabetes control.
He also have hypertension. Now has some kidney damage and some heart problems. Diabetes is the number one cause of blindness in the world.
It's the number one cause of kidney failure and need for dialysis. It's the number one cause of loss of a limb or amputation
of the lower extremities. What typically ends up happening to a patient with diabetes? The number one cause of death in patients with type 2
diabetes is cardiovascular complication-- so a heart attack, stroke, problem with circulation
in the leg, heart failure. Tell me about this-- the vibration. Can you feel it?
Nope. SANJAY GUPTA: One of the things that patients are told to do is to examine their skin and particularly, their feet.
Why is that? GUILLERMO UMPIERREZ: This is because many patients with diabetes develop peripheral neuropathy, or nerve damage.
You have a little neuropathy. Yeah. GUILLERMO UMPIERREZ: So they don't feel. So if they have a little cut, if they have an infected toenail,
they don't have pain. The thinking seems to be among people that type 2 diabetes oftentimes is a result of poor choices.
Is that true? Is that a fair assessment? Partially true. But genetics plays a significant role.
Now, not every obese person develop diabetes. So that means that the genetic predisposition is extremely important.
I remember-- my dad's a diabetic-- and I remember when he was diagnosed, our diet and our whole house changed.
Even us kids had to eat a different diet once that happened. Everything changed in our lives, from that moment on. Family support is a key for the success
of diabetes treatment. You've been doing this for a long time. Has it gotten a lot busier? Are you seeing more patients?
Oh, significantly. So the epidemic of diabetes-- there is about more than 30 million Americans with diabetes
right now. We have about 70 to 80 million people who are, we'll call prediabetes. SANJAY GUPTA: And if you start to do the math on that--
Yup. One in three Americans over the age of 20, especially over the age of 40 or 50, will have diabetes.
This is an epidemic, as you say-- diabetes. You've seen it through several decades.
What kind of grade would you give the medical establishment? We have done much, much better.
In this country, the rate of complications and death related to diabetes is coming down.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Where we have not been successful-- in preventing the development of diabetes.
What we do right now, hopefully, is trying to prevent the appearance of diabetes
and the appearance of complications of diabetes, or when they appear, try to treat them aggressively early on, trying to prevent the end stage of the complication
of diabetes. [MUSIC PLAYING]
living with diabetes
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