Type 2 diabetes is a prevalent chronic illness of global proportions. Its main cause is the pancreatic β-cell dysfunction and insulin resistance in target organs, which leads to insulin deficiency in the organism (Chatterjee et al., 2017). By 2015, type 2 diabetes has become the sixth leading cause of disability, and cardiovascular diseases and strokes associated with it are particularly prominent as a cause of death (Chatterjee et al., 2017).
In the last decades, as obesity steadily rises, and sedentary lifestyles become more widespread in the developed countries, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes steadily increases (Chatterjee et al., 2017). Thus, type 2 diabetes has medical costs, or the difficulties of coping up with the illness, economic ones, which are the financial costs of managing it, and the organizational ones for the healthcare systems.
As a chronic disease, type 2 diabetes requires prolonged management and coping on the patient’s side. There is no known cure, although glucose management “reduces macrovascular outcomes such as cardiovascular disease” (Chatterjee et al., 2017, p. 2239).
As with many chronic illnesses, successful management of type 2 diabetes relies on early detection, which necessitates the screening of individuals at risk of developing the illness. One complication that arises is distinguishing type two diabetes from type 1 diabetes or maturity-onset diabetes of the young, especially since type 2 diabetes becomes increasingly common among younger patients (Chatterjee et al., 2017). Moreover, managing the illness may be particularly challenging in the patients younger than 25, “for whom complex phenotypes might necessitate many decades of intensive management” (Chatterjee et al., 2017, p. 2239). The key steps to preventing type 2 diabetes are preventing obesity, mainly with diet and exercise interventions, which can reduce the risks of chronic illness and decades of complications and drug therapy.
Reference
Chatterjee, S., Khunti, K., & Davies, M. J. (2017). Type 2 diabetes. The Lancet, 389(10085), pp. 2239-2251.