Diabetes causes multiple problems
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| Dr. Gift Eze, left, confers with a patient. |
“It can adversely affect any part of the body, depending upon where it presents,” says Dr. Eze, who is board certified in internal medicine.
For example, diabetes can be the underlying cause of stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, and kidney disease, Dr. Eze says. “The presence of diabetes increases the process of arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries).” Diabetes can compromise a person’s immunological system, making it harder to fight off the flu, pneumonia or another problem, he explains.
One common effect of diabetes is nerve damage and poor wound healing because blood circulation is poor. Untreated, a small wound can turn into a larger ulcer, which can become infected, and then get out of control with infection of nearby bone or spreading into the blood stream. To save the patient’s life, the doctor may need to amputate the infected foot or leg.
Not everyone who has heart disease or high blood pressure, for example, has diabetes. But those with diabetes have a higher risk of heart disease and other health complications.
Dr. Eze is concerned about the increase in diabetes. Each day, he treats several patients with the disease; each week he diagnoses new patients with the disease.
“We are seeing too many patients with diabetes,” he says. He attributes part of that increase to better diagnoses of the disease, but changing lifestyles is also adding to the increase. “The rise in obesity in our society is increasing the number of people with diabetes.”
“Patients should be concerned about getting diabetes,” Dr. Eze says. “It is like an octopus with a lot of tentacles.”
More than 20 million American children and adults have diabetes; nearly one third of them don’t know they have it, says the American Diabetes Association. Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, is caused by the body’s inability to produce enough insulin or to recognize the insulin it does produce.
The diabetes association explains the process this way: Insulin is necessary for the body to produce sugar (the basic fuel for our body’s cells). Insulin also takes the sugar from the blood into the cells. Without the sugar, your body's cells are starved for energy. Meanwhile, too much sugar building up in the blood can hurt your eyes, kidney, nerves or heart.
Early signs of diabetes include…
• Increase in the need to drink water.
• Waking up at night several times to go to the bathroom.
• Recurring vaginal yeast infections in women.
Though obesity is a contributing factor, people with a family history of diabetes are more likely to get the disease, Dr. Eze says.
“If a patient has diabetes, the most important thing a patient can do for himself is to lose weight. This will help delay the progression of the disease and help prevent complications.”
Convincing patients to lose weight, exercise or otherwise change their lifestyle is not easy, he says. Sometimes, it takes a major health event, such as a stroke or even amputation of an affected limb, to get their attention.
Besides the encouragement of lifestyle changes, Dr. Eze also can treat the disease with oral hypoglycemics, insulin injections and medications.
“If caught early enough, you can slow down the progression of the disease and its complications,” he says. “People don't die from diabetes, but from its complications.”