Medical Questions » Diabetes Questions » Question No. 253
| Question: | I have a bad family history of late onset diabetes. How can this be detected? Would a routine blood test for cholesterol find it? Are there any lifestyle changes I can make to prevent it? What are the early symptoms? |
| Answer: | Late onset (type 2, or maturity onset) diabetes is a totally different disease to juvenile (type 1) diabetes. The former can be controlled by diet and tablets, while the latter requires regular insulin injections. There is a family tendency to develop type 2 diabetes, but it is not inevitable that you will develop it just because close relatives have the condition.
Diabetes is diagnosed by a simple blood test for the presence of excess sugar, but a test for cholesterol will not reveal the presence of sugar and diabetes.
You can delay, or prevent the onset of this form of diabetes by reducing the amount of sugar and fat in your diet, and by keeping your weight within normal limits.
The early symptoms are excessive thirst, passing more urine than usual, tiredness, blurred vision and frequent skin infections. If you are concerned that you may develop type 2 diabetes in the near future, your general practitioner can arrange for a glucose tolerance test (GTT) to be performed by a pathology laboratory. This test takes a couple of hours to perform, and can tell more accurately if you have diabetes, and sometimes it can predict if you are likely to develop the condition in the near future.
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