W”‰e see many special walks designed to raise money for one cause or another. It’s a way to raise awareness, too.
But on March 12 at Lafayette’s Girard Park, you can take part in a fundraiser that makes an important point about the disease organizers hope to cure.
It’s the Walk for a Cure to benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
You can learn more about walking or giving at www
.walk.jdrf.org.
We hope you’ll find a way to contribute to the cause, and the cause will contribute to a cure.
Diabetes is a problem everywhere, but it’s one of those conditions that are more prevalent in Acadiana than elsewhere.
And, partly because our obesity problem is growing, so is our diabetes problem.
That’s not the case with one Acadiana diabetes patient we told you about this week — Ean Young, 2.
He has Type 1 diabetes, so his body doesn’t manufacture the insulin needed to manage the metabolism of sugar.
He needs insulin injections to live, and that’s hard for a little guy to understand. Type 2 diabetes, which also interferes with the regulation of blood sugar, usually is diagnosed later in life.
It’s linked to, among other things, obesity and lack of physical activity. Type 2 may be manageable with diet and exercise, or it may require insulin injections.
With either type, the patient risks cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, blindness and other serious health problems.
Acadiana is part of a geographic pattern of increased frequency of diagnosis.
Think of a check mark that starts in Oklahoma, goes down to the central Acadiana coastline and then runs northeast into the Ohio Valley and Appalachia.
This band doesn’t include Lafayette or Vermilion, but it does include Acadia, St. Landry, Evangeline, Iberia and St. Martin. Diabetes is diagnosed more frequently there.
Louisiana pays dearly for being part of that check mark, both in human and financial terms.
Estimates from the middle of the past decade indicate that between 7 percent and 11 percent of Louisiana’s people are diabetic. For Louisiana’s African Americans, the rate was 13.7 percent. In 2003, about 40 Louisiana people in every 100,000 died of complications related to diabetes. The national rate was about 25.
In Louisiana alone, we spend more than $2 billion a year to diagnose and manage diabetes. So even those of us who don’t know a diabetic feel the pain.
That’s why it’s important for all of us to help find a solution to a serious health problem that affects so many of our neighbors.
