Diabetes in Youth

Diabetes in Youth:

Usually all a person with latent diabetes needs to do is eat a sensible diet, get plenty of exercise, and have regular checkups to make sure the condition has no progressed. These are good health rules for anyone.

In some cases, a diabetic condition may be quite serious by the time it is correctly diagnosed. Juvenile diabetes, which strikes mainly children, teenagers, and youn adults, may develop quite suddenly. The person may feel fine, and then, with hardly any warning, he or she falls so seriously ill that emergency hospitilization may be necessary.

Juvenile diabetics account for only about 20 percent of the total diabetic population. The far more common forms of maturity-onset diabetes usually strike people after the age of thirty-five or forty- and then strike mainly people who are overweight. The probability of getting diabetes roughly doubles with each decade of life, and with each 20 percent of excess weight.

Maturity-onset diabetes usually develops gradually with plenty of warning signals. But a person may overlook some of the symptoms of think they are due to something else. Reaching for that extra bottle of Coke, one might think. It certainly is hot today! A person with a sudden need to urinate more than usual might pass it off with the thought, It must have have been that soup I had for dinner, or I shouldn’t hve had that extra glass of milk before bedtime. Even in children, the early signs and symptoms of diabetes may be misleading. If a child suddenly begins wetting the bed, his or her parents are more likely to wonder about emotional problems or spank the child for disobedience than to suspect diabetes. But taken together, the symptoms of diabetes spell out a very clear warning message. Since each of us has about one chance in five of developing diabetes at some time in life, it is a message we should all learn to read.