- Treating diabetes and its complications costs the NHS £10 billion per year – around 10% of the total NHS budget.
- Once known as ‘late onset diabetes’ type 2 diabetes now affects all age groups including teenagers and even children as young as 9.
- Diabetes is a medical condition that affects the way the body uses blood sugar – a food that feeds the body’s cells. In our bodies we have an organ called the pancreas which contains cells that make a hormone called insulin. We need insulin to help our bodies use sugar.
- There are two main types of diabetes: type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
- In type 1 diabetes the cells in the pancreas that make insulin have been destroyed so it can’t make insulin. Patients with this type of diabetes need insulin injections to control sugar levels. Type 1 is not preventable and it accounts for 10% of cases.
- In type 2 diabetes, the main issue is that insulin does not work properly in the liver and muscles because of fat in these organs. Sugars can’t get into liver and muscle cells and therefore levels of sugar build up in the blood and cause complications. This type accounts for 90% of cases and is mostly preventable. Type 2 diabetes can be prevented, improved or put into remission by eating healthily, losing weight, limiting alcohol and being physically active. It can be treated by drugs including insulin.
- 1 in 15 people in the UK have diabetes – that’s 4.6 million including the estimated almost 1 million people who have type 2 diabetes but don’t yet know it.
- When we started this project in 2016 there were 7,000 diabetes-related lower limb amputations per year. That number increased to to 8,793 in 2018. That’s 169 per week or 24 per day.
- Note all figures correct as 2018. Diabetes UK provide the most up to date figures see: https://www.diabetes.org.uk/
