Although living with type 1 diabetes can be difficult at times, when you compare the management and treatment of the condition today to that seen in the second half of the twentieth century, things have certainly changed dramatically. And, in case you’re thinking that was a very long time ago, remember that people born in the 1950s are still only in their 40s and 50s now.
Fifty years ago type 1 diabetes was not well understood and its treatment and management was very different to that seen today. So, if you find yourself getting depressed with living with diabetes, it’s worth taking a few minutes to compare your situation to that of people who were born in the middle of the twentieth century.
People born during the 1950s and diagnosed with type 1 diabetes were facing a 20% chance of dying from the disease within 20 years of diagnosis and this figure rose to about 30% just 25 years after diagnosis. Compare this to people born in the late 1970s, and who are in their late 20s today, and you will see that these figures have now dropped considerably to about 3.5% and 7% respectively.
Type 1 diabetics born in the 1950s were also facing a 25% chance of kidney failure which, in those days, could not be detected in its early stages. Also, once detected, there was no know way to control the progress of the disease. Nowadays, fewer than 10% of diabetics suffer from kidney disease and drugs like ACE inhibitors and ARBs slow the progress of the disease and can often prevent it from reaching the stage of kidney failure.
For the vast majority of people with diabetes (about 90%), diabetic retinopathy would appear within 25 years of their diagnosis and accounted for 20% of all cases of blindness in people from 45 to 75 years of age. Now, laser eye surgery and carefully monitored follow up treatment reduce the risk of diabetic retinopathy by up to 90%.
For diabetic mothers the risk in those days of seeing major birth defects in their babies was approximately 3 times higher than the rate seen in the general population. Close monitoring and control of blood glucose levels throughout a pregnancy today means that this risk has been reduced to about the same as that seen in the population at large.
During the 1950s diabetics had to monitor their blood glucose levels by testing their urine so that they were always looking at their past levels, rather than at their current glucose levels. The urine test was also only capable of detecting high levels of blood glucose and could not detect often dangerously low levels.
As if all of this were not enough, patients needed to rely on injections of animal derived insulin and such things as today’s variety of insulin formulations, as well as pumps and insulin inhalers were yet to be introduced.
The risks from type 1 diabetes are far lower than they have ever been and the way in which we manage the condition makes living with diabetes a lot easier. However, it is the future for those with type 1 diabetes that gives us the greatest hope.
We now understand far more about the condition and know much more about the underlying biology of diabetes. Further ongoing research also means that we will continue to see advances in the management of the disease and, it is to hoped, will also see a solution to the problem of reversing the autoimmune destruction of insulin producing cells before too much longer.
Technorati Tags: childhood diabetes, Diabetes, Diabetes Mellitus, Juvenile Diabetes, Type 1 Diabetes
