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An astonishing number of Americans are affected by either Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes. Not only do they face the difficulties of dealing with diabetes, but they are also at risk for other medical conditions.

The key to preventing these issues begins with a heatlhy lifestyle, and of course obtaining health insurance for you and your family in order to maintain preventative care. Once you have those things in place here are some other tips!

A small US study suggests that people with type 2 diabetes who drink the equivalent of four cups of coffee or more a day may be causing their blood sugar levels to go up by 8 per cent (compared to non caffeine days), thus making it harder for them to manage their condition.

The study was carried out by Dr James Lane, a psychologist at Duke University Medical Center, in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues, and is published in the February issue of Diabetes Care.

Other recent studies have shown that in habitual coffee drinkers with type 2 diabetes, caffeine appears to raise glucose and insulin after intakes of standardized carbohydrate loads. Lane and colleagues decided to investigate if this effect manifested after meals in the everyday life of type 2 diabetics and how it might undermine their efforts to manage their condition.

They used small glucose detection devices implanted under the abdominal skin of 10 patients so they could observe the rise and fall of their blood sugar while they went about their normal day for 72 hours, the first time such a thing has been done in relation to caffeine consumption, they said.

The patients had established type 2 diabetes and were regular coffee drinkers who consumed at least two cups everyday. They were also trying to manage their diabetes through a combination of diet, exercise and drugs, but not with extra insulin.

On one day the patients took caffeine capsules equal to about four cups of coffee and on the other day they took identical capsules except they contained a placebo. The study was a double blind crossover study, so neither the patients nor the drug administrators knew which capsules contained the caffeine and which contained the placebo.

The patients all had the same nutrition drink for breakfast but chose their own food for lunch and dinner.

The results showed that on caffeine days, the patients’ average daily sugar levels went up by 8 per cent. After meals the blood sugar levels were even higher: 9 per cent after breakfast, 15 per cent after lunch, and 26 per cent after dinner.

Lane said they didn’t know how caffeine drove up the glucose levels but they had a couple of ideas.

“It could be that caffeine interferes with the process that moves glucose from the blood and into muscle and other cells in the body where it is used for fuel. It may also be that caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline — the fight or flight — hormone that we know can also boost sugar levels,” said Lane.

Either way, it appears that caffeine causes blood sugar to rise which is bad news for patients with diabetes, he added.

As more research evidence gathers to support this conclusion, it is likely that official guidelines for how to manage diabetes will advise diabetics to avoid coffee and other drinks that contain caffeine, said the researchers.

As Lane pointed out:

“Coffee is such a common drink in our society that we forget that it contains a very powerful drug: caffeine.”

“Our study suggests that one way to lower blood sugar is to simply quit drinking coffee, or any other caffeinated beverages. It may not be easy, but it doesn’t cost a dime, and there are no side effects,” he added.

The next stage would be to do a study where coffee drinking diabetes patients gave up caffeine to see if this helped them manage their blood sugar levels more easily.

Thanks to Medical News for this helpful information!

Every  parent wants the same thing: a heatlhy pregnancy and a health baby. However, with the stresses in the world today, many babies can be affected in ways that parents would never expect.

A recent study of stresed mothers painted a startling picture.

Severe emotional stress during the first delicate months of a woman’s pregnancy may permanently impair the neurodevelopment of her unborn child, leading to an increased risk of schizophrenia later in life, new research suggests.

The link between maternal stress and fetal development is not new: A study in the Lancet in 2000 suggested, for example, that a mother’s stress during pregnancy may increase the risk of congenital brain malformations in her baby. And it has been well established that severe maternal stress is associated with low birth weight and premature birth. Now, a new study by British and Danish researchers in this week’s Archives of General Psychiatry examines the impact of stress — the acute, agonizing kind, such as that experienced with death or sickness in the mother’s immediate family, and not the run-of-the-mill anxiety of daily life — on the future psychiatric health of her offspring.

The study group consisted of 1.38 million births recorded in Denmark, from 1973 to 1995. Children were followed from age 10 until their death, their departure from Denmark, the onset of schizophrenia or the end of the study period in 2005. Researchers determined also whether the birth mothers had suffered extreme stress — due either to the death or illness (heart attack, cancer or stroke) of a first-degree relative — six months prior to and at any time during pregnancy. The data showed that women who experienced a close family member’s death during the first three months of pregnancy had a 67% increased risk of having a child who would develop schizophrenia later in life. Stress before pregnancy or in late pregnancy had no such effect; neither did stress associated with a family member’s illness.

Intuitively, it makes sense that death would have an impact that illness did not. “The problem with diagnoses of heart disease and that kind of thing is that it’s likely that there has been worry about the health of that individual for some time,” says the study’s author, Kathryn Abel of the Centre for Women’s Health Research at the University of Manchester. “Once somebody gets admitted with a heart attack or stroke or a serious illness, in some way there is relief because they’re being managed — it might not be such an acute event, which we know death to be, even when someone has been ill for a long time. When they die, that’s it.”

If the severity of maternal stress matters, then one would expect the death of child to cause more injury than the death of a parent. Indeed, says Abel, her data hinted at such a response — compared with women who lost a parent, those who lost a child appeared to have a higher likelihood of giving birth to a child at risk for schizophrenia — but her sample size was too small to confirm the theory.

How the mother’s emotional stress impacts her fetus’s growth is still mostly a mystery. It’s possible that increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol interfere directly with fetal development. Or it may be that the mother’s stress response triggers a cascade of other chemical changes — in her immune system, in blood levels of sex hormones, or perhaps in cell-signaling proteins called cytokines — that may indirectly affect early fetal development. Whatever the exact mechanism, its effects lend credence to the theory that starting early in pregnancy, “mothers transmit information to their fetus about what condition they’re likely to be born into — whether they’re going to be thrifty and expect to be in a relative state of starvation, for example, or whether they can expect plenty — a clear evolutionary advantage,” says Abel. “But it may be that in some settings, it has an adverse consequence because it restricts the growth of the fetus, and perhaps causes abnormal development of the brain, which makes it more susceptible to diseases, such as schizophrenia.”

Though the current study looked only at schizophrenia risk, Abel and her collaborators at the University of Aarhus believe that maternal stress may have a similar effect on the risk of other conditions, among them depression and other mental disorders, along with social consequences such as the risk of criminal conviction or the likelihood of marriage, “things that tend to cluster in the deprived,” says Abel. “We have not shown that this is specific to schizophrenia. We’ve just only looked at schizophrenia.”

Abel hopes to replicate her findings in Sweden — with a bigger study population and richer data, including the socio-economic status of mothers. “Social class is one of the big, enduring predictors of risk of mental illness. The lower the social class the higher the risk. You’re born with this risk,” says Abel.

The other big congenital risk factor is genetics, first-degree family history being the most powerful risk factor for schizophrenia. And, in fact, the new study found that the added risk associated with maternal stress disappeared in children whose mothers already had a family history of mental illness — showing once again that the interplay of environment and genes is anything but straightforward.

Thanks to Time for this great information!