PORTUGAL COULD witness an explosion in the number of patients with Type II diabetes over the next 15 years because of infantile obesity.
According to Portuguese specialist Davide Carvalho from the Mediterranean Group for the Study of Diabetes, participating in the annual American Diabetes Association in San Francisco, Type II diabetes was affecting people at a younger age.
The specialist said that in 2005 Portugal ranked in fifth place from the list of European Union countries with the highest number of cases of Type II diabetes.
He said that children who were now 10-11 years old could contribute towards that explosion by the time they reached 30.
“People with this kind of diabetes are usually aged between 50-55 years old but soon we could be diagnosing people within the 30-40 age brackets with the disease,” he warned.
Glicemia
The first line of defence against this scenario was “to fight infantile obesity” said Manuela Carvalheiro, the Director of Coimbra University’s Endocrinology Unit, who also said that an increase in the percentage of obese patients did not automatically lead to a large increase in diabetes.
At the same congress, two studies were presented on glicemia which concluded that controlling blood sugar levels in Type II diabetes patients did not lower the risk of heart attacks or strokes.
But according to the Advance study by the George Institute in Sydney, Australia, developed over five years, glucose control in Type II diabetes patients reduced the risk of renal diseases by 21 per cent.
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