BDO: How Can Diabetes Effect Other Potential Diseases?
Dr. James Gavin: So with respect to its relationship to other chronic diseases that we worry about, diabetes is what we call a cardiometabolic syndrome, and that means that it’s associated with a lot of other things that are worrisome when it comes to cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes.
And what we see is that diabetes, type 2 diabetes, the most common form is associated with overweight and obesity–80% of people who have type 2 diabetes are overweight or obese and the medical problems associated with obesity are enormous–no organ system is without risk if you have chronic obesity.
2) 70 percent of people with type 2 diabetes have hypertension. High blood pressure, a leading cause of heart failure, a leading cause of kidney failure, a leading cause of stroke. So a very powerful association.
And people with diabetes have a condition that we call diabetic dyslipidemia; that means that they have an abnormal pattern of blood fats, their HDL, the good cholesterol is low, their LDL, the bad cholesterol tends to be too high and their triglycerides another type of fat in your blood which is associated with low HDLs, their triglycerides tend to run high.
These are the kinds of things that we see all too often in people with diabetes which means in order to control this disease, you’ve got to do more than worry just about blood sugar. It’s a comprehensive risk factor reduction strategy that we have
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