How to Live With Borderline Diabetes
It can send a chill up anyone's spine being informed by your physician that you have borderline diabetes. This is a disease that can literally alter y...
It can send a chill up anyone’s spine being informed by your physician that you have borderline diabetes. This is a disease that can literally alter your life. But, each year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are being told just that as the number of diabetes cases continually rises. Currently, there are over 18 million known case of diabetes in the U.S. that have diabetes. It’s estimated that there’s approximately 6 million more people that have diabetes and don’t know it. And it remains a serious health problem costing patients billions of dollars in health care every year.
What are the symptoms of borderline diabetes? What exactly is borderline diabetes? Sometimes called pre-diabetes, it’s a condition where a person has glucose levels between normal levels and levels that would identify them as diabetic. The reason that many people don’t know they have the condition is that it’s relatively free of symptoms. In a person with no signs of diabetes, the body produces insulin in order to assist the cells in breaking down foods into energy. In diabetics and pre-diabetics, however, either the body is unable to create insulin or it is unable to utilize the insulin. This is one reason why people with borderline diabetes tend to be tired much of the time. They are eating, but their body is unable to break down the food into usable energy.
A lot of physicians have discontinued using the terminology borderline diabetes to describe this condition. The way they see it, a person who exhibits the symptoms of pre-diabetes is, in fact diabetic. and they see no real medical reason to confuse the situation. many also feel that telling someone that they have borderline diabetes inhibits the person from taking diagnosis seriously – because “borderline” sound as if you don’t really have a disease. Others doctors feel that the condition of these patients is more precisely described as insulin resistant or impaired glucose tolerance. Other doctors, however, still use the term and find it helpful to maintain the distinction between pre-diabetes and diabetes.
For medical care physicians that continue to use the term, borderline diabetes is diagnosed when a person’s glucose level, as determined by glucose tests, fall between 100 to 125 milligrams per deciliter.
Most of the time, a person who has borderline diabetes will see the disease progress to diabetes. However, in some cases, with a change of eating habits and other healthy lifestyle changes, the disease will be reversed.
According to many health experts, pre-diabetes is a preventable disease. Studies have shown a distinct correlation between the increase in the amount of fast foods that we eat and the new incidences of type II diabetes. Likewise, there is a correlation between our increasingly sedentary lifestyles with increases in the number of people diagnosed with diabetics. Making the defeat of diabetes even more urgent is that a person with pre-diabetes or diabetes is at greater risk for a host of other diseases including heart disease, stroke, liver disease, and more.
Luckily, researchers have begun to identify and catalog the many risk factors that predispose one towards developing diabetes. Hopefully, in the near future, diabetes will be looked upon as a long forgotten disease of the past.
