Today is World Diabetes Day. This year’s theme is “Diabetes: Protect your family.” The three focus areas are
1. Discover – Early diagnosis and treatment is key to helping prevent or delay life-threatening complications.
2. Prevent – many cases of type two diabetes can be prevented by adopting a healthy lifestyle. This can be achieved at home by encouraging healthy meals and exercise. By doing this you set a positive example to your children which encourage behaviours that can help reduce and prevent the likelihood of type 2 diabetes.
3. Manage – Managing diabetes requires daily treatment, regular monitoring, a healthy lifestyle and ongoing education. Family support is key
Here are some facts and figures
- There are over 425 million people worldwide living with diabetes. This number is expected to rise to 522 million people by 2030
- 1 out of 2 people living with diabetes remain undiagnosed
- There are over 1 million children and adolescents have type 1 diabetes
- Each year 4 million people die from diabetes
- Diabetes was responsible for at least $727 billion in health expenditure in 2017
- Diabetes concerns every family. It is a leading cause of blindness, amputation, heart disease, kidney failure and early death.
To learn more about diabetes please visit https://worlddiabetesday.org
