While childhood obesity rates remain sky-high, as a society we have yet to feel the full weight of our expanding waistlines.
For young adults, this could mean a type 2 diabetes epidemic lurks in the not-so-distant future.
It can take up to 10 years for a person to develop type 2 diabetes, so it means we have yet to see the most damaging effects of childhood obesity, according to Dr. Joyce Lee. Dr Lee is a University of Michigan paediatric endocrinologist whose work on this topic was recently published in Archives of Paediatric & Adolescent Medicine.
The obesity epidemic is like a tsunami with lag time before it strikes. When this built-up wave finally hits young adults, serious type 2 diabetes implications will surface.
It used to be that individuals developed type 2 diabetes in their 50s and 60s, but now it’s being diagnosed much earlier. In many cases diagnosis is being made when people are in their 20s and 30s.
If a diabetes test is taken early it can help to identify if you have diabetes. This in turn can lead to better management of the disease.
If the disease is occurring in prime adulthood years, it could lower life expectancy. The longer you have diabetes, the more likely you are to develop side effects, such as blindness, heart disease and kidney failure.
Diabetes authorities also raised concerns about type 2 diabetes affecting a greater percentage of women during their childbearing years.
If a woman suffers from diabetes of any kind and she gets pregnant, the child has a high risk of becoming obese and insulin resistant at an early age.
Obesity is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes, a chronic disease that begins as insulin resistance
Insulin resistance occurs when the body’s cells do not use insulin properly.
Type 2 diabetes is different from type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a non-preventable disease caused by autoimmune destruction of the pancreatic cells that produce insulin, leading to lack of insulin production.
As obesity and diabetes cause people’s quality of life to go down, disease-related costs will increase.
The crisis is that in the next 25 years, rather than continuing to see life expectancy grow, it might plateau or even decrease just because of the rate of diabetes.
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