Did you know that 4.7 million people in the UK are living with diabetes? That’s one in 15 people.
This number has doubled over the past 20 years. 1 And yet despite its prevalence, diabetes is still often misunderstood.
To help with this, we recently ran a webinar to help advisers better understand the condition and the opportunity to help their clients with diabetes. The webinar featured Gavin Cookman, Non-Executive Director at the NHS and former board member of Diabetes UK. Gavin has lived with Type 1 diabetes most of his life and is passionate about raising awareness of the condition. He’s extremely knowledgeable about it and here’s what I learned from talking to him.
Diabetes is a big deal
There’s a myth that diabetes is a mild disease, but no form of diabetes is mild. In layman’s terms, diabetes causes a person’s blood glucose level to become too high. This happens because there’s not enough insulin in the body to change glucose into energy. Too much sugar in the blood over long periods of time can lead to sight loss, amputation, kidney failure, stroke or death. Too little sugar in the blood can result in losing consciousness or even falling into a coma.
When it’s not managed well, it can cause serious health complications. One in five strokes are caused by diabetes. More than 1,700 people have their sight seriously affected and more than 8,500 leg, toe or foot amputations happen every year because of the condition.1
But living with diabetes and managing it isn’t easy. Maintaining good blood glucose control is a continual balancing act between taking medicines (oral tablets or insulin injections), exercising, eating the right food, managing stress, and learning how your body reacts to these things. So it’s hardly surprising that the demands of the disease can affect people’s psychological wellbeing.
Sources:
1 Diabetes UK, Us, diabetes and a lot of facts and stats, January 2019
