If your doctor has ever talked to you about your blood sugar or prediabetes, or if diabetes runs in your family, you may be at a higher risk of developing diabetes. Is there any way to prevent it from happening? Join M. Regina Castro, M.D., as she outlines some common questions, such as:
• What is the difference between Type I and Type II diabetes?
• What does it mean to be prediabetic?
• How do we prevent Type II diabetes from developing?
Read the transcript:
So what can we do to prevent diabetes?
When it comes to type 1 diabetes, because this is an autoimmune disease and we don’t really know what triggers it, prevention is difficult. There’s no known
prevention for type 1 diabetes.
However, when it comes to type 2 diabetes, there’s a lot that we can do. Most people who develop type 2 diabetes will have had a period that may be going on for years before they become diabetic. What we call pre-diabetes is that time where their
blood sugars are slightly higher than normal, but not high enough to call it diabetes. Blood sugars that are typically in the 100 to 125 range when they’re fasting. And those people, study after study has shown that if we do nothing, these people have a very high risk of developing diabetes. But the same Studies have shown that the most effective way of preventing progression from that stage of pre-diabetes to diabetes is lifestyle modification and weight loss.
Basically, we need to become more physically active, we need to change our diets. And studies have shown that losing as little as five to seven percent of body weight can result in significant reductions in the rate of progression to diabetes by as much as 50 or 70 percent.
