Note from Connie: We’ve heard quite a bit lately about how diabetes cuts short your life. Now a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that diabetics can expect to live 8 fewer years on average than people who don’t have the disease.
Jennifer Moore updates us about this new study, which we learned about from Steven Reinberg of Health Day.
Oscar Franco, M.D. and his team at University Medical Center Rotterdam collected data on 5,200 men and women who participated in the famed Framingham Heart Study, tracking what happened to them until they either got heart disease or passed away.
What the researchers learned is rather distressing. Men aged 50 and older lived on average 7.5 fewer years than non-diabetics. Women with diabetes aged 50 and up experienced an even greater reduction in their life span — 8.2 years on average.
Men and women with diabetes were each found to be at greater risk
for developing heart trouble than non-diabetics. Their heart disease
also put them at greater risk for death — diabetic women with heart
disease were more than twice as likely to die as non-diabetic women,
while diabetic men with heart disease were 1.7 times more likely to die
than non-diabetic men.
What’s more, even if the diabetics in the study were not also
grappling with heart disease, life expectancy declined 7.8 years for
men and 8.4 years for women.
"It’s sobering to think about the number of years of life lost," Dr. Larry Deeb, president for medicine and science at the American Diabetes Association, said in Reinberg’s article.
"We ought to be able to reduce the cardiovascular risk because we can manage diabetes better today, but we’re not."
This news certainly is unfortunate for people living with diabetes.
But maybe the best way to keep more folks living long and living well
would be to empower them to stay diabetes-free in the first place by
eating well and getting enough exercise. Reading books like Connie’s SUGAR SHOCK! would certainly be a good place to start!
Thanks to iVillage for the tip about this research.
Jennifer Moore for the SUGAR SHOCK! Blog