Treatment Options

Each person with diabetes can have different needs. Working with a team of health professionals, you will develop a treatment plan tailored to your unique physical requirements, tastes and lifestyle. Your top priority? Keeping blood glucose under control. How? By eating balanced meals that help maintain a consistent blood glucose level throughout the day to meet your nutritional needs.

As a first step, you need to create a food and exercise plan for blood glucose control (see Nutrition and Exercise sections). Your meal plan will provide options that will help you address your overall health, if weight loss is needed, and will give you meals that are well balanced. By following your meal and exercise plan, you will have a much greater likelihood of maintaining health blood glucose levels.

If diet and exercise alone don't bring your blood glucose down to the normal range (or if your hemoglobinA1c-HgA1c or A1C for short-which measures your blood glucose level over a period of at least 3 months is quite high) you may need medication. Depending on a patient's blood glucose level and general health, physicians usually prescribe oral medications first. The six types of diabetes pills currently available all work differently. Sometimes the pills are used alone, sometimes in combination with one another and sometimes with insulin. If oral medication doesn't work, physicians then prescribe insulin. Two new injectable diabetes drugs recently entered the market. They're most effective when used in the early stages of diabetes or when a patient needs little or no insulin. Sometimes newly diagnosed type 2 diabetics start off with insulin to stabilize blood sugar.

Diabetes Medications

Diabetes pills have 3 modes of action. The pills can help the body to release more insulin, become more insulin sensitive or slow the breakdown of foods into glucose.

Click here to view the Oral Anti-diabetes medication chart

All diabetics need to see a diabetes specialist (endocrinologist or diabetologist) twice a year and meet regularly with members of their healthcare team, including a nurse educator, a nutritionist and an exercise physiologist.

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Thursday
November 20, 2008

Tip of the Day

Regular exercise increases the number of insulin receptor sites on cells, making the body more sensitive to insulin.

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