The holiday season presents plenty of challenges to diabetics, with parties featuring buffets of food and plenty of cookies, cakes and other sweets to go around.
This year the challenges are even tougher, because diabetes patients could face added risks for catching the H1N1 virus, also known as "swine flu."
"Diabetics in general, if they're not well controlled, are more susceptible to any infection," according to Dr. Christian Gastelum, an endocrinologist and teacher on the staff of the internal medical residency program at White Memorial Medical Center in the Boyle Heights district east of Downtown. "The elevated blood glucose impairs their immune system, so their immune cells or white blood cells don't work properly, and they're unable to fight off bacterial and viral infections as well as their non-diabetic counterparts."
Concerns about diabetes patients facing the risks of H1N1 are particularly strong in Los Angeles, with its large populations of Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans. Medical research indicates that diabetes affects members of those ethnic groups at higher rates compared to the overall population.
Medical officials say that the heightened risk of contracting H1N1 doesn't mean that individuals with diabetes should stop going out in public — but in most cases they should seek a vaccine against the virus and take care of their diets and medications.
"So, if patients think to themselves, 'well, I'm taking my medicine and that should protect me,' they need to know what actually protects them is a normal blood glucose level," Gastelum says. "Things in our body work the way they're supposed to when our blood glucose is normal."
Such efforts are all the more important, medical professional say, because complications from H1N1 can be more severe for a person with diabetes. H1N1 can lead to dehydration, especially in patients with compromised kidney function, as is often the case with diabetics. H1N1 patients often suffer from severe nausea and vomiting, which can also harm their kidneys in the long run, and the effects of the flu can cause diabetes to spiral even further out of control.
Gastelum says that anyone with diabetes who believes they are suffering from flu symptoms should seek immediate medical attention.
"If they do have symptoms — body ache, significant fever — and if it's early enough — there are some antiviral medications such as tamiflu that we can use," he says. "They won't necessarily cure the infection, but they'll make the symptoms much more tolerable and patients are much less likely to end up in the hospital."
Visit White Memorial Medical Center's website at whitememorial.com on the Internet for more information in Spanish and English. Visit the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health website at lapublichealth.org — or call the toll-free 2-1-1 telephone line — for more dates and locations for H1N1 vaccination clinics and other information in English, Spanish, Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Farsi, Khmer, Korean, Russian, Tagalog and Vietnamese.
Sam Hassan is a writer for the L.A. Garment & Citizen.
Photos from www.cdc.gov.
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