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Hispanics' war against diabetes
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If diabetes were a battlefield enemy, every cable channel analyst would be challenged to find a tactic to defeat it. Not only is diabetes, so far, a disease without cure, but its numbers are also climbing each year and few groups are being impacted like Hispanics.
Obesity, which contributes greatly to diabetes, is pervasive in Colorado's Hispanic community, especially among its children. According to the Colorado Department of Health, four in every 10 Hispanic children in Colorado, between ages 2-14, are obese or overweight.
Diabetes, which carries a one hundred billion dollar annual price tag in this country, is a disease that affects the way a body uses food for energy. It is caused when the pancreas does not produce insulin, a hormone necessary to convert sugar, starches or food into energy for daily life.
Type 1 diabetes is the more serious form of the disease, requiring daily injections of insulin. Type 2 diabetes, which is only slightly less serious, is the form of this disease that affects the majority of Americans. Nevertheless, both forms impact millions of Americans each year.
'It was devastating,' said Ray LeJeune, 'when we found out our daughter had diabetes.' His daughter, Jessie, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was twelve. Now grown, she has managed it well, checking her blood sugar several times a day and also injecting insulin several times a day.
But LeJeune, an Adams County resident, lives with the same fear as millions of others whose loved ones are diabetic. Without constant monitoring, diabetes can be fatal. 'My biggest fear is her having a low blood sugar episode and no one knows what to do,' he said.
While diabetes can be fatal it can also wreak havoc in other ways, too. It can damage
According to the Center for Disease Control, there will be 800,000 new cases of diabetes diagnosed in the U.S. this year. Currently, six percent of the nation's population has it and that number is expected to rise by fifty percent by 2025.
While there is no known cause for diabetes it is known to be passed on in families. Some ethnic groups, including Hispanics, suffer diabetes at a disproportionate rate. And the prognosis for diabetes is gloomy. The CDC reports that cases of diabetes jumped significantly among Hispanics between the years 1997 and 2003, increasing three hundred thousand new cases to 1.5 million persons.
While heredity, which is a significant cause of diabetes, is impossible to control many other things that lead to diabetes are not. Life style and diet, for example, can be managed. Done properly, diabetes need not severely impact quality of life.
Personalities, including actor Halle Berry, singer Aretha Franklin, blues legend B.B. King and Patty LaBelle are all people who are diabetic who have not let it alter their lives dramatically.
LeJeune's daughter, Jessie, who has now lived with Type 1 diabetes for nearly twenty years, is another example. She trains every day, has run marathons and otherwise, by monitoring and controlling her blood sugar levels, lives a normal life.
Diabetes now represents a one hundred billion dollar impact on America's health care costs. With the Baby Boomer generation now reaching retirement age, and succeeding generations more frequently succumbing to this health problem the forecast for diabetes does
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