Daily HealthBeat Tip

Trouble coming

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I'm Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

You have to watch diabetes like a hawk. If diabetes gets out of control, it can lead to all kinds of bad things, such as blindness, amputations, heart attack and death.

Just the same, checking a disease constantly takes a lot of work. And studies show a lot of people don't do it. This means they miss chances to make potentially lifesaving corrections in their eating, physical activity and medical treatment. At the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Dr. Judith Fradkin says people who don't keep checking can wind up finding out things have gotten a lot worse than they thought.

Fradkin also says the checks are almost literally as easy as ABC:

"A is A1C. That stands for a test that measures your average blood glucose over the previous three months. B is for blood pressure. And C is for cholesterol, and particularly LDL cholesterol � the so-called 'bad' cholesterol." (12 seconds)

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: September 8, 2005

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