Did you know that today, Saturday 14th November 2020, is World Diabetes Day?
Diabetes is a lifelong condition that causes a person’s blood sugar level to become too high.
There are 2 main types of diabetes:
- Type 1 diabetes – where the body’s immune system attacks and destroys the cells that produce insulin
- Type 2 diabetes – where the body does not produce enough insulin, or the body’s cells do not react to insulin
There are an estimated 4.5 million people living with diabetes in the UK.
Around 90% of people with diabetes have type 2 diabetes. Around 8% of people with diabetes have type 1 diabetes. About 2% of people with diabetes have rarer types of diabetes.
Around 700 people a day are diagnosed with diabetes….. That’s the equivalent to one person every 2 minutes….
Approximately 400,000 people in the UK have type 1 diabetes including around 29,000 children. In children under 5, the incidence of type 1 diabetes is rising by five per cent each year.
Although it used to be referred to as ‘juvenile diabetes’, around half of the newly diagnosed cases of type 1 diabetes are in people over the age of 18.
Around 85% of people diagnosed with type 1 diabetes have no family history of the condition.
The UK has one of the highest rates of type 1 diabetes in the world, for reasons that are currently unknown.
It is estimated that there are almost 1 million people living with Type 2 diabetes who don’t even know they have it.
One in ten people over 40 in the UK are now living with a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes, according to new research.
The new figures show that 90% of people living with a diagnosis of diabetes in the UK are those with Type 2
Type 2 diabetes is often linked (not in all cases) to being over weight, inactive or having a family history of type 2 diabetes.
During pregnancy some women have such high levels of blood glucose that their body is unable to produce enough insulin to absorb it all. This is known as gestational diabetes and in many cases disappears soon after the baby is born.
If nothing changes, more than five million people will have diabetes in the UK by 2025.