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by MARK POWELL
At first blush, it almost seems cruel: to discuss a potentially fatal illness linked, among other factors, to overindulging in sugar during a season when sweet treats are almost unavoidable. But pause for a moment before you eat another leftover Christmas cookie and hear what one Midlands physician has to say.
“The southeastern United States typically has the highest amounts of diabetes in the country, and it’s snowballing out of control.”
Dr. Christian Moore with the Columbia Medical Group, part of Lexington Health, not only knows what he’s talking about from his years of medical training; he’s also lived with it. His late sister was diabetic.
“It was wildly uncontrolled,” Dr. Moore said. “She was on dialysis. She had retinopathy. She had neuropathy. She had gastroparesis. It was just so hard to watch her dwindle away. She was diagnosed at age eleven, and she told me that if she had just known what it could have done to her, she might have done some things differently.”
That experience left Dr. Moore with a passion to educate others about the disease that’s seemingly all around us. And a look at the numbers shows he’s confronting a tall task.
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South Carolina’s Department of Health (SCDPH) estimates approximately 630,000 adults — or 1 in 7 adults in the Palmetto State — have been diagnosed with the illness. And according to Diabetes Free SC, around 120,000 adults don’t know they have it because they’re undiagnosed.
So, just how often does Dr. Moore see patients with diabetes-related issues?
“It is without a doubt the bread and butter of my practice,” he said.
Which says a lot.
“There are different types of diabetes – Type 1 and Type 2,” Dr. Moore explained. “The vast majority of patients develop diabetes later on in life. That’s due to a combination of genetics as well as lifestyle changes. Some people inherit a weaker pancreas that just isn’t equipped to handle the amount of work that we’ve put on it with our diet. When that’s the case, that organ burns out and quits working. It retires early, and then it’s no longer able to regulate blood sugar the way it did earlier in life.”
“Over time, the body loses the ability to produce insulin and regulate its own blood sugars,” Dr. Moore continued. “And then the consequences become a lack of insulin production, insulin resistance – and then the next domino to fall is blood sugar regulation.”
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BAD PROBLEMS BECOME WORSE PROBLEMS
When the body loses its ability to regulate blood sugar, that’s when problems become very serious, very fast – including the potential for loss of vision.
“I worked for a retina specialist, and I saw a diabetic retinopathy,” Dr. Moore said. “If you’re damaging blood vessels inside the eye, that is a type of blurry vision and/or blindness that glasses can’t fix. There have been surveys by The New England Journal of Medicine and colleges where they would routinely ask patients, ‘what’s the worst thing you could think that could happen to you – cancer, heart attack, stroke or blindness?’ And, most of the time, blindness is in the top three. And so the effects of diabetes on the eye are one of the leading causes of preventable blindness.”
As with many diseases, diabetes offers warning signs – indicating it’s time to see a doctor.
“If there’s a family history of diabetes, that person would be at an increased risk,” Dr. Moore explained. “Some of the classic symptoms that you see in the beginning of the disease are excessive thirst and dehydration – as the kidneys are using a lot of water flushing out the excess sugars. So, the thirst and dehydration go hand-in-hand there. Sometimes, excessive eating too.”
A medical professional can check for diabetes with simple blood tests – but the key for patients is taking control early.
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“There are a few ways to diagnose diabetes,” Dr. Moore said. “We use what’s called ‘fasting glucose,’ meaning you haven’t eaten anything that day and we test what your blood sugar is at that particular moment. If it’s above a certain level, specifically 126, that’s a sign your blood sugars are not being properly regulated. Because if you haven’t eaten, there’s no reason for those blood sugars to be that high. If you randomly have a blood sugar greater than 200, that is also indicative of diabetes – especially if you pair it with the symptoms we mentioned earlier.”
“Another way to check is with a hemoglobin A1C, which is not looking at sugar directly; but your red blood cells themselves – checking to see what percentage has sugar attached,” Dr. Moore continued. “That provides a good three-month average of what your blood sugars might have been.”
“If you have two tests that are above that normal limit, that’s enough to establish the diagnosis of diabetes,” Dr. Moore noted.
As is so often the case with chronic health conditions, the earlier the diagnosis, the sooner treatment can begin – and the better a patient’s chances are to avoid serious, long-term consequences. In fact, in some early stages, diabetes can be addressed with relatively simple steps.
“It’s lifestyle modifications,” Dr. Moore says. “I ask my patients to work on losing weight because losing fatty tissue can improve insulin’s effectiveness. I also request they watch out for their sugar intake: eliminating sugary drinks like sodas and sweet tea, and sugary snacks like ice cream and cake. Also, I ask them to try and limit the amount of carbohydrates they’re eating.”
In some early diagnosed cases, diabetes can even be reversible.
One last bit of advice: don’t underestimate the importance of family and friends helping make sure their loved ones are getting checked.
“With diabetes being so common, we can look into our community and, unfortunately, see other people who have been diagnosed and who may be suffering from some of its complications,” Dr. Moore said. “That could be a motivation for people to get screened themselves.”
With a new year now upon us, what better time to take control of our health?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
J. Mark Powell is an award-winning former TV journalist, government communications veteran, and a political consultant. He is also an author and an avid Civil War enthusiast. Got a tip or a story idea for Mark? Email him at mark@fitsnews.com.
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