It's called the silent killer because you may not even know you have it
Credit to Author: Gordon McIntyre| Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2019 01:40:31 +0000
Andy Rose lifted his arm to show a quarter-sized plastic plug on the underside, a miracle device he’s been wearing for three years now.
Only once has the device fallen off during a soccer game, said the Vancouver Whitecaps’ midfielder. He sleeps with it on, showers, swims and scans it with his phone up to 30 or 40 times a day to measure his glucose.
“This has completely changed my life, this little guy,” Rose said of the FreeStyle Libre flash glucose monitoring system. “He’s my best friend. Without him I’d be pricking my finger 15 times a day.”
Rose was shocked to find out three years ago that he had Type 1 diabetes, and today — with November being National Diabetes Month — the soccer player is only too happy to use his status as a pro athlete to help raise awareness of the disease.
“Your whole life changes in a split second,” the 29-year-old said of discovering one is diabetic.
Type 1 means your body is producing no insulin; Type 2, when your body isn’t producing enough insulin, is more insidious because most who have it don’t know they have it.
“The reality is the majority of people who are diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes have no symptoms,” said Joanne Lewis, director of knowledge management with Diabetes Canada. “Most people who have Type 2 diabetes find out by accident as part of a routine blood test.”
Everyone should be tested at age 40, she said, and regularly after that. People of African, Asian, South Asian, Indigenous and Hispanic descent are more prone to getting Type 2, so should get tested more often.
“Getting tested is really first and foremost because you’re most likely not going to feel the symptoms,” she said.
In B.C., 520,000 people have been diagnosed with diabetes, but it’s estimated there are another one million who have undiagnosed diabetes or have pre-diabetes; and while you may not feel any symptoms, diabetes can reduce your lifespan by 10-15 years.
Also, with diabetes you are more likely to wind up in hospital with cardiovascular disease, end-stage renal disease or have a leg amputated. Diabetes contributes to 50 per cent of kidney failures, 40 per cent of heart attacks and 30 per cent of strokes.
But perhaps most disturbingly, a recent survey shows the vast majority of the British Columbians diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes fail to meet Diabetes Canada’s guidelines on fitness and nutrition. Dr. Akshay Jain of Fraser River Endocrinology in Surrey said people don’t realize what a big difference following those guidelines makes.
“The survey shows only one-in-two Canadians actually knows that having diabetes will increase the risk of heart attack, stroke and cardiovascular death,” he said. “The other aspect of that survey is most people don’t realize that if somebody has diabetes it actually reduces the age when you can develop heart disease by 10-15 years. People with diabetes get heart attacks, strokes, cardiovascular death much earlier than people without diabetes.”
One thing to do is to exercise about two hours a week spreading it over several days, he said. Nothing fancy, it can be as easy as parking your car farther away from the office or horsing around with your grandkids.
“Simple measures go a long way … you don’t have to join a fancy gym,” he said.
Diabetes is often called the silent killer because victims can feel fine even as their blood vessels are clogging up. That unawareness, said Lewis, makes it hard to change your lifestyle behaviour such as what and how much we eat, and how much we exercise.
“It’s not like being lactose-intolerant where if you happen to drink milk you’re going to know you shouldn’t have had that milk because of the results you have later,” she said. “Eating large portions or less-healthy foods or whatever it is you’re doing, such as not eating vegetables and fruits, you don’t feel anything as a result of that.“
If you have diabetes, you have it for life. Start with small, progressive changes that are realistically sustainable, Lewis said: “That’s better than making drastic changes or trying to change too many things at once.”