Diabetes

Here are types, symptoms and diagnosis of diabetes.

Hi viewers I am Dr. Neelum. I am consultant in endocrinology and diabetology. Today I will be briefing you regarding diabetes because it’s a major it’s a big public health problem and it is spreading like an epidemic Diabetes is basically a disorder in which our glucose is not able to get utilized by the body for lack of insulin either or when the insulin is not able to act the way it should act in the body tissues. And in that case we have two major types of diabetes. That is type-1 Diabetes and type-2 Diabetes. In type-1 diabetes there is absolute depletion of insulin and the patients are usually lean and they are requiring insulin for their diabetes control for entire life. And type-2 diabetes patients are usually obese and they have family history of diabetes, diabetes run in their family and they usually have insulin resistance.

They can be well controlled initially with diet, lifestyle modifications and medicines. And subsequently in the late stages or maybe, when it is not controlled with the medicines, they may require insulin. Now there is another variant of diabetes that is GDM; Gestational Diabetes Mellitus which is seen in pregnant females. And why it is important to know that? Because nowadays. Due to screening of diabetes and during pregnancy it is picked and sugar controls have to be in target range because there is fetal development and metabolic programming is done so it is important to have a healthy baby for which sugars should be adequately controlled via lifestyle modification, diet, if not then insulin is also given.

Then the other less type of diabetes are also known which are syndromic diabetes, which I am going to discuss here, because the important ones and the major ones are type-1 and type-2 And the cause of concern is that initially it was thought that type-2 diabetes is seen after 40, but it is not the picture. It was always there in kids, now it is increasing in alarming proportions. The kids are more glued to the screen and gadgets and they are having more type-2 diabetes because they have sedentary lifestyle, their food choices are little, they are more into binging, snacking and they are not that much physically active. And even younger kids in their teens and, adolescence and young adults, they are also having type-2 diabetes. So all this has to be picked because they develop complications first than adults. So how do we pick whether you have diabetes or not? So the symptoms are polyphagia, osmotic symptom typically these may not be in all the patients. You have to have a high index of suspicion.  If you have family members who are diabetic or obesity or hypothyroid or hypertension, their blood sugar should be checked.

Now how do we diagnose diabetes? Well blood tests which are done to detect diabetes are very simple. They are fasting blood sugar and 2 hours pp. we have sudden cutoff. And there is one more test which is called HPA1C. So HPA1C tells you monthly average blood glucose which comes in percentage. If it is above 6.5% and fasting blood glucose is above than 126mg/dl then you are labelled as diabetes. So in this part I’ll be speaking about the diagnosis which I have just spoken and in the next part I’ll be telling you once are diagnosed with diabetes, how can you have control over the diabetes and how can you follow up to have a good glycemic control?

If you want to have online consultation, you can contact me via lybrate website or you can see me in my clinic which is located in Sushant Lok, Gurgaon.