Diabetes Awareness Month is November and an expert with Greene County Medical Center explains how the disease impacts lots of peoples’ lives and some of the treatment options.

Registered Nurse and Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist Laura Walker says diabetes is when someone’s body has too much sugar and you can’t internally regulate it, which can cause damage to the blood vessels and nerves throughout the entire body, typically impacting heart, eyes, kidneys, brain and feet. 

Walker points out the primary treatment option for Type I Diabetes was insulin, because the disease tends to destroy the natural insulin that the body would typically produce, along with nutritional changes. She explains one way to treat Type II Diabetes, when the body has too much insulin and it doesn’t have enough resistance to fight it off, is by using a blood glucose monitor. Walker notes this device helps keep track of the lifestyle choices and works to retrain the body to be on a better path.

She reveals a growing popular treatment for Type II is using the glp1 injectables.

“I’m sure you heard about ones called like Ozempic or Monjaro and they can be very helpful for managing blood sugars and appetite control. They’ve been made popular on social media due to their weightloss benefits, but they aren’t without problems. They are quite expensive and they can cause significant side effects. Glp1s definitely aren’t a cure, by any means, but they can be very helpful in combination with lifestyle change to manage Type II Diabetes and then to prevent the need for insulin injections.”    

Walker tells Raccoon Valley Radio that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 12 percent of the US population have diabetes, 30 percent were pre-diabetic and 88 percent were metabolically unhealthy.