Type 1 diabetes awareness
The diabetes blogosphere is buzzing about the Raise Your Voice campaign, a grass-roots effort to get the word out about type 1 diabetes. Started by blogger Kerri Morrone of Six Until Me, the first Raise Your Voice for Type 1 Diabetes Awareness Day is this coming Monday, April 14.
Why the need for this special day? Much of the focus on diabetes these days is on type 2 diabetes, a disease in which the body still produces insulin, but doesn’t produce enough, and/or is not able to use it properly. Factors that contribute to the development of type 2 diabetes include obesity, high blood pressure, poor diet, and genetics. It’s by far the most common form of diabetes, accounting for at least 90% of cases, which helps to explain why it often hogs the spotlight.
Type 1 diabetes is quite a different beast, caused when the body’s immune system destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas. Type 1 diabetics produce little or no insulin, and will die if they don’t get treatment. Type 1 presents its own set of challenges, both for people living with it and for researchers working to understand and cure it. The purpose of the Raise Your Voice campaign is to increase the public’s awareness of type 1 as a unique condition.
Kerry offers some great ideas for things both large and small that you can do to inform those in your life about type 1 diabetes and increase your diabetes advocacy. How will you “Raise Your Voice” on April 14?
Why the need for this special day? Much of the focus on diabetes these days is on type 2 diabetes, a disease in which the body still produces insulin, but doesn’t produce enough, and/or is not able to use it properly. Factors that contribute to the development of type 2 diabetes include obesity, high blood pressure, poor diet, and genetics. It’s by far the most common form of diabetes, accounting for at least 90% of cases, which helps to explain why it often hogs the spotlight.
Type 1 diabetes is quite a different beast, caused when the body’s immune system destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas. Type 1 diabetics produce little or no insulin, and will die if they don’t get treatment. Type 1 presents its own set of challenges, both for people living with it and for researchers working to understand and cure it. The purpose of the Raise Your Voice campaign is to increase the public’s awareness of type 1 as a unique condition.
Kerry offers some great ideas for things both large and small that you can do to inform those in your life about type 1 diabetes and increase your diabetes advocacy. How will you “Raise Your Voice” on April 14?
Tags: diabetes, 1, diabetes advocacy, raise your voice, type, type 1 diabetes
Add a Comment
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Comment by Emily V on April 13, 2008 at 5:09pm - Thanks for the comment, Toni. This page has the most recent diabetes statistics for the US, though they're from 2005. The total number of people with diabetes then was an estimated 20.8 million, though only 14.6 million of those were actually diagnosed. The estimated percentage of diagnosed diabetes patients with type 1 was 5-10%, which puts the number of people with type 1 at about 0.7-1.5 million.
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Comment by Toni Kistner on April 12, 2008 at 6:51pm -
hey Emily, this is great, thanks for letting us know about Raise Your Voice.
do you have any stats on the number of type 1 vs type 2 sufferers in the US?
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