world diabetes | Diabetes Healthy Solutions

Why Should you Join Diabetes Chat Rooms?

Can Diabetes Support Groups Online Help Me?

Caring for a diabetic person or living with diabetes usually means constant stress as well as constant decision-making. Unfortunately, in some cases, healthcare providers are not always available to answer diabetes-related questions.

For instant for diabetes-related information, and diabetes support, diabetics and caregivers sometimes turn to peer support rooms and DOCs (Diabetes Online Communities) such as diabetes chat rooms.

What are Diabetes Chat Rooms?

Many diabetes support communities are created by diabetics and are safe places where people affected by the disease can learn from others, provide information, and seek advice from others without judgment, stigma, or fear. People with diabetes reap numerous tangible benefits from joining a Diabetes Online Community.

Some of these benefits include greater social connectedness, lower levels of diabetes distress and anxiety, improved stress management, improved blood sugar management, and reducing the risk of diabetes-related complications.

These and other numerous benefits are part of the reason why these communities are catching on all over the globe. Not only are we seeing more people participating, but we are also seeing more communities each year.

Diabetes educators and diabetics alike have been discussing the benefits of joining DOCs for decades. Although they knew the facts, they just didn’t have the research and data to back it up. However, now researchers have started collecting more and more data on the benefits of diabetes chat rooms.

Online peer support groups were the trending topics at the 2019 ADCES (Association of Diabetes Care and Education Specialist) conference, largely due to a review of 47 studies published in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology in May 2019. More recently, a meta-analysis of 9 DOC reviews shows that being involved in a diabetes chat rooms is associated with significant improvements in behavioral, psychological, and clinical aspects of health.

Science-backed benefits of joining peer support groups

Social Connectedness

Diabetes can have a negative impact on the social lives of people living with diabetes, caregivers, as well as their friends and relatives. This is particularly true for people living with type 2 diabetes particularly because they avoid sharing their diagnosis with friends, colleagues as well as family members due to the fear of stigma.

Diabetes chat rooms help diabetics create and join support networks that understand the nuances of managing diabetes on a deeper level. Therefore, they don’t feel alone.

The May 2019 review also found that diabetics who join and are actively involved in diabetes chat rooms experience a higher quality of life as compared to the general population of diabetics. This results in part from social support, empowerment, and shared experiences resulting from social connections created in diabetes chat rooms.

May Improve Glycemic and A1C Levels

According to the same 2019 review, diabetes chat rooms were also associated with stable A1C levels in adolescents. This is a positive sign, particularly because adolescents’ A1C levels tend to increase especially during this life stage.

On the other hand, the use of diabetes chat rooms in adults is associated with improved A1C levels. A1C shows the average blood glucose levels over the last 2 or 3 months. Besides being used to diagnose diabetes, A1C is also used to monitor and determine the efficacy of diabetes eating plans.

Although everyone with diabetes has different goals, generally, A1C levels of less than 7% mean better blood glucose control and a significantly lower risk of complications related to diabetes. According to a study published in the JMIR Diabetes journal in 2009, highly engaged diabetes chat room users tend to have better glycemic levels than diabetics with lower engagement.

This can be attributed to the fact that involvement in diabetes chat rooms offers accountability, which tends to motivate users to be keener about their blood glucose levels.

Encourages Healthier Self-Care Activities

The Future Science OA July 2018 issue published a study that showed that diabetes chat rooms tend to encourage users to perform better self-care activities compared to non-users. These activities include eating a healthy diet, regular exercise, checking glucose levels, and taking medication and insulin.

Diabetes chat rooms also provide convenient places for people with diabetes to crowd-source answers and solutions to self-care concerns such the best systems for monitoring blood glucose levels, weight loss, and the best foods for people living with diabetes. This helps set up diabetics for long-term success

Although there are numerous benefits of joining diabetes chat rooms, it is essential to keep in mind that they don’t replace advice from medical practitioners. This is particularly because misinformation in the digital era is a real concern. However, according to a study published in the Current Diabetes Reviews, misinformation in diabetes chat rooms was uncommon (ranging between 0% and 9% of all posts).

Visit a Diabetes Chat Room HERE!

What is the Cause of Diabetes?

In order to understand what is the cause of diabetes, it’s important to get a few of the basic facts about the disease first.

Diabetes is a non-communicable disease that affects people of all ages from kids all the way through to seniors. Diabetes is a very serious, not only because of the health risks associated with it, but also that it is affecting more and more people every year, not just in North America, but across the entire world.

Diabetes is the Lack of, or Inefficiency of Insulin in Your Body

The way that our body becomes energized is by having the food we eat be broken down into glucose so that it can enter into the blood stream and be delivered to the cells that need energy.

For the cells to use this energy they need insulin, produced by the pancreas. Without the insulin, it’s like the cells are starving for energy because they can’t access the glucose in the bloodstream.

This is really bad, and another way to think about how bad this can be is to think about how you breathe. Your body needs oxygen to survive, and the lungs are the organs that can change the oxygen in the air into oxygen that is usable for your body.

If you think about the way that lungs convert the oxygen so that it can be used, insulin is doing the same thing with the energy being delivered to the cells. Without the insulin, the cells starve, just like without our lungs we would not be able to breathe.

Without the proper amounts of this necessary sugar changing chemical/hormone the blood, glucose levels in the blood stream begin to rise to extremely high levels. Once they reach a certain level the body systems begins to suffer cell damage.

Understanding this condition can be complicated. A good start for someone who wants more insight and possibly a need to help can begin by looking into their choices of masters of nursing programs. You can learn at your own pace and gain the experience needed to truly help friends, family and people alike.

The major cell damage most commonly associated with high blood sugar levels are:

Severe nerve cell damage
Heart damage
Kidney damage
Severe eye damage

This can be avoided if the diabetic can regulate and keep their blood sugar amounts in a normal range for their body that is neither too high or too low.

The next important thing to understand is that there are two different types of diabetes:

type 1 diabetes
type 2 diabetes

The Cause of Type 1 Diabetes

Unfortunately, there is nothing that someone can do about type 1 diabetes, at least not with the current medical expertise that we have today. Type 1 diabetes is caused because your body has ceased to produce insulin.

For one reason or another your body has attacked the pancreas and it is no longer able to function correctly. This type of diabetes can affect anyone and is not dependent on lifestyle.

Type 1 diabetes usually occurs in people under the age of 40, and rarely affects those over 40, and those affected will need to take insulin to regulate their blood sugar level for the rest of their lives.

The Cause of Type 2 Diabetes

Luckily, type 2 diabetes is preventable and in some cases reversible. The reason that we can affect this type of diabetes is that it is largely caused by poor diet, and lack of exercise.

Genetics can come into play here, so if someone in your family has developed type 2 diabetes then you may be at a higher risk for developing it yourself, so you should take care to live a healthy lifestyle so that you won’t have to worry about diabetes.

More good news: 85% of people with diabetes have type 2 diabetes. What this means is that it is within your power to resist the development of diabetes.

Remember that the main causes of type 2 diabetes are:

Lack of exercise
Poor diet
Excess body fat for a prolonged period of time

The Major Causes of Diabetes

The amount of insulin being produced by the body is not enough
The cells have developed a resistance to the insulin and it is not working as effectively as it once did.

The problem with insulin resistance is that what used to work fine for the body, slowly becomes ineffective over time. With this in mind it’s important to realize that your general health and fitness level is very important, and if you want to avoid problems like diabetes later in life, that you should be making good health choices today.

What are the symptoms of childhood diabetes?

What are the symptoms of childhood diabetes? Diabetes is a very serious condition that affects everyone. It don’t just affect adults, it also affects many children all over the world. Diabetes is where the pancreas slows or even stops production of a very essential chemical called insulin. Insulin is a very important as the body needs it to change the sugar in the blood into fuel that the body can use. When the insulin levels are to low for the sugar to all be used it begins to build up. At a certain level the body begins to suffer serious damage. Damage that can be done includes heart damage, eye damage, nerve damage, and kidney damage. This makes spotting diabetes a serious need, especially in children. So what are the symptoms of childhood diabetes?

There are many symptoms of childhood diabetes. Frequent urination, thirst, extreme hunger, loss of weight, and fatigue are just some of the major symptoms of childhood diabetes. Frequent urination is caused by the body trying to rid itself of dangerous high blood sugar. But this causes another serious symptom, excessive thirst. Thirst is caused by the amount of water being urinated to cleanse the body. Extreme hunger is caused by the cells not getting the required amounts of fuel needed. This makes the cells tell the brain that they are hungry. Loss of weight is caused by the cells not getting the needed fuel and eating stored fuel. Fatigue is caused by the cells not getting enough fuel. These symptoms point out the very dangerous disease diabetes. These symptoms are the same for adults and children but should be recognized immediately and contact a doctor for a diagnoses. So now you know what to look for when it comes to symptoms of childhood diabetes.

Do you know how to treat high blood sugar?

Do you know how to treat high blood sugar? Treating diabetes and knowing how to do this is very important for those who have diabetes, a disease that ravages our nation and the world. Diabetes is where the bodies’ blood sugar levels are too high.

This is caused by the pancreas creating too little of the chemical insulin, this chemical is what changes glucose (blood sugar) into fuel that the body can use. With too little insulin the glucose levels rise and can wreak havoc upon the body. The damage done can consist of nerve damage, kidney failure, blindness, and even heart disease. Knowing how to treat high blood sugar is best for those who have the disease as it will affect them later on in their life.

First ask your doctor, he will know how to high blood sugar. In order to treat high glucose levels you will have to revamp your entire lifestyle. In order to treat diabetes, you must begin to eat items with less sugar and more fiber (ask your doctor for more specifications for your individual needs). Second you must begin a regular exercise regimen that will help greatly in your fight against high blood sugar.

But do as your doctor tells you as too much may result in hypoglycemia, to low blood sugar. (Hypoglycemia is just as dangerous with confusion, dizziness, shaking, and eventually fainting) The final addition that your doctor may prescribe is medications. These can range from vitamins, insulin, and other medications. All of which help treat the large glucose levels. A glucose blood meter will also be needed to measure glucose levels daily. These units use small plastic strips to measure the glucose in the blood and display it on a small screen for easy use. So learn how to treat high blood sugar and improve your life.