The news just gets more depressing and diabetes-inundated by the day!
Now comes the latest diabetes horror — this one relating to our nation’s kids.
About 2 million kids aged 12 to 19 — or about 7 percent of children in the U.S. — have a pre-diabetic condition that’s linked to their being obese and inactive, and both of these situations puts them at risk for full-blown type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular problems, government data suggest.
In widely circulated articles, the Associated Press reports that researchers from both the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health studied the prevalence of abnormally high blood sugar levels in youngsters several hours after they ate. These high blood sugar levels are called "impaired fasting glucose" or "IFG" and are measured in a blood test.
As noted previously, the news wasn’t good: One in 14 boys and girls (from a nationally representative sample) had impaired fasting glucose. Among overweight adolescents, one in 6 had the pre-diabetic condition.
Sure enough, adolescents with IFG were more likely than kids with normal fasting glucose levels to have other symptoms, too, which suggest that they could be on the road to heart and other problems.
Indeed, these 12-to-19 youngsters with IFG — whose lives are supposed to be ahead of them — also had higher average levels of bad cholesterol and blood fats (triglycerides) than normal kids.
"The numbers are definitely concerning," says CDC researcher Dr. Venkat Narayan, co-author of the study, which appears in Pediatrics on Monday and is based on data involving 915 youngsters, who participated in a 1999-2000 national health survey.
If things don’t change, the future of our nation’s kids looks dismal! The way things look now, these youngsters will be spending their 20s and 30s moving towards diabetes!
At present, of the nearly 21 million Americans with diabetes, most of them are adults with type 2 diabetes, which impairs the body’s ability to properly use insulin, the blood-sugar regulating hormone.
As you may know, type 2 diabetes used to be called "adult-onset diabetes," and it is strongly linked to being overweight and inactive.
Sadly, though, nowadays, we’re seeing more and more kids getting type 2 diabetes, which is why the condition is no longer called "adult-onset diabetes."
As the Associated Press reports, Dr. Francine Kaufman, head of the diabetes center at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, notes that about 25 percent of diabetic children treated there now have type 2 diabetes. But a decade ago, only 4 percent had the condition. Talk about a shocking rise in stats!
For the study, researchers used criteria from the American Diabetes Association:
- Impaired fasting glucose means blood sugar levels of at least 100 milligrams per deciliter.
- Diabetes is considered above 125 .
While most had average levels of 89.7 (considered normal), 7 percent of kids in the study were considered pre-diabetic. That translates to about 2 million youngsters.
About 16 percent of the kids studied were obese, which is roughly the same as recent national estimates.
One of the dilemmas with elevated fasting glucose is that it "has no symptoms, but it signifies an advanced metabolic problem, which will, in most cases, progress to type 2 diabetes over time," Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston, told the AP. Dr. Ludwig did not work on the study.
Experts such as Dr. Ludwig stress over and over again the importance of "intensive lifestyle interventions."
That means kids need to start getting involved in physical activity and improving their diet. In other words, don’t let your kids drink soda as if it were water or cookies as if they were low-calorie veggies.
But there is hope. Making diet and exercise changes can help adults to prevent their pre-diabetes from becoming diabetes so it’s likely that the same can happen in children, the researchers said.
Please start helping your kids to make proper dietary choices and to enjoy exercise so that we can turn this condition around!