DIABETES IN OLDER ADULTS

Diabetes in Older Adults

Table of Contents

Introduction1

Types of Diabetes1

Type 1 diabetes1

Type 2 diabetes2

Gestational diabetes2

Significance of Diabetes in the Elderly2

Diagnosis of diabetes in Elderly3

Causes of Diabetes in Elderly3

Treatment of diabetes4

Conclusion6

Diabetes in Older Adults

Introduction

Diabetes mellitus, which is more commonly known as diabetes, comes with a big group of diseases that are related to the metabolism. In this disease, a man has to suffer from a number of different diseases, like high level of sugar in the blood, etc. Diabetes mellitus is the most common endocrine disease and major health problems in the elderly. It is actually a syndrome, ie a group of diseases characterized by the presence of elevated glucose levels in the blood is called hyperglycemia and its complications. The body's own insulin, secreted by the pancreas, is insufficient or fails to keep blood glucose within normal limits. It is, however, a complex disorder that affects the metabolism of a more profound and that can have serious health consequences also on the elderly. “Diabetes is a prevailing problem especially in the older adult people.”

Types of Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes

This sort of diabetes usually occurs due to the failure of the human body to produce a sufficient amount of insulin, and the affected people have to manually inject insulin into his body. This type of diabetes is also known as “Insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus.”

Type 2 diabetes

This type of diabetes usually occurs due to resistance of the insulin, i.e. a condition, in which cells in the body could not utilize insulin in a proper way, and sometimes, it is combined with a downright deficiency of insulin.

Gestational diabetes

This type of diabetes occurs during the time, when the women is pregnant, she never had a problem of diabetes ever before, and she posses a very high level of glucose in the blood during pregnancy period.

Significance of Diabetes in the Elderly

Diabetes is extremely common in the elderly. Its incidence, as in many other diseases, increases with the age. It is estimated that over 75 years to 20% of the population is diabetic. In addition, many of these elders affected at any given time know they have the disease.

The importance of diabetes in the elderly lies in the complications associated with the disease, similar to that of younger adults. Diabetes is the sixth leading cause of death in the elderly, but also has an important contribution to cardiovascular mortality to which it contributes. It is known that elderly diabetics die from cardiovascular causes twice as many elderly non-diabetics, and this is further increased by the presence of diabetes associated with other vascular risk factors such as hypertension and obesity (Metcalf, 2008).

Diagnosis of diabetes in Elderly

As is common in young people the presence of typical clinical diabetes, polyuria, polydipsia, polyphagia, the elderly this clinic is very rare due to changes in renal and their thirst mechanisms are impaired. It is often, therefore, asymptomatic and detected the beginning increase in blood glucose in a health examination.

Sometimes the elderly have nonspecific symptoms like fatigue, incontinence, ...