You’d think a disease that can cause blindness, leads to amputations, and is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States would incite mass panic.
Yet Americans — and even some doctors — don’t take diabetes very seriously. (Did you even know it’s American Diabetes Month?) “Sometimes, people think ‘serious’ means things that kill you right away,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, chair of the Emory University Department of Global Health. “But, the reality is, I would be more concerned about diabetes than Ebola.”
This lax attitude toward the disease may explain why nearly 30 percent of Americans who have diabetes don’t realize it, according to a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, conducted by del Rio and other Emory University scientists. They analyzed health data for 29,353 people from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey, identifying those with diabetes based on levels of fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1C (an indicator of blood-sugar control).
Overall, about 12 percent of all U.S. adults had diabetes, which translated to 28.4 million people in 2012. Among those, nearly 8 million hadn’t been diagnosed — a stat that’s made all the more alarming by the fact that most regularly went to the doctor: Two-thirds of undiagnosed diabetics had seen a health care provider at least twice in the past year, the study found.
Going undiagnosed — or even just delaying the process — is asking for internal trouble. The longer diabetes goes untreated, the worse the outcome tends to be. “Once the disease sets in, it’s really progressive,” study co-author Mohammed Ali, an assistant professor of global health at Emory University, told Yahoo Health. “It may be slow in some cases, but it leads to really disabling and often fatal complications.” Common but scary outcomes include vascular disease, kidney disease, or eye disease, which can lead to blindness.
On the flip side, if you catch and control diabetes early, “patients are very likely to do well, in terms of delaying the onset of all these horrendous complications, preserving their quality of life,” said Ali.
Unfortunately, the nature of the disease means that patients who should be undergoing blood tests often slip through the cracks: Diabetes is typically asymptomatic until people develop serious complications, so doctors don’t necessarily have clear cues to prompt them to suggest testing early on (although weight, family history, and lifestyle should be a consideration). “Diabetes is the silent killer,” said del Rio.
And because the U.S. is a nation of episodic care — that is, we seek medical attention for specific symptoms, rather than as a matter of routine — doctors aren’t necessarily thinking about performing preemptive blood tests on high-risk people. Instead, they’re usually focusing on, say, the patient’s back-pain problem, and not his or her overall care.
Credits: Yahoohealth, Getty Images