Descriptive Epidemiology Case Study

Epidemiology

Descriptive Epidemiology Case Study

The United States has a growing diabetic population, some have called it an epidemic, due to many factors that have become normalized for the country's citizens. People eat an increasingly poor diet, do not exercise as they should and have jobs that grow more sedentary with each passing year. It is difficult to name a single factor that is more damaging, but it would seem that people in the United States are doing everything that they can to encourage diabetes mellitus instead of combat it.

The incidence of diabetes is increasing across the nation with few regions seeing a decrease. Type-II diabetes is most prevalent along the East Coast but looking at a state-by-state map of the diabetes population, the problem is growing throughout the country. The state with the largest population, California, also has the most diabetes cases. Nine percent of the population in California (4,084,074 people) have been diagnosed with some form of diabetes. However, this is not the state with the highest concentration of cases as a percentage of the whole population. That distinction goes to the states of Texas, Florida and Ohio which have a diabetes population that is 10% of the states total population. The Atlantic seaboard states have the highest amount of citizens with diabetes as a percentage of the total populations in those states.

Morbidity and mortality can be explained as the diseased individual vs. The expired individual. People who have diabetes have some factors that can be observed while they are going through the disease that can be classified as being either stable factors of the disease or ones that can be modified. The primary stable characteristic is that a person who has type-II diabetes is going to need some form of assistance to help them maintain their blood sugar. In a healthy individual, the pancreas creates and releases the proper amount of insulin needed to regulate the body's blood sugar needs; in the diseased individual the body's ability to do this is compromised. The modifiable characteristic of morbidity in this case is the amount of insulin required to be added to the person's blood to stabilize their blood sugar. The diseased individual can also increase exercise in order to lower their weight and increase their metabolism, eat healthier so that the body can perform more of the regulation itself, or the individual can do none of these things and move to the mortality category. To prevent mortality, altering one's lifestyle (or modifying it) is the only alternative.

Diabetes has become one of the more critical problems for aging adults over the past few decades (Pompei, 2006). The reason for this is that the metabolism begins to slow down in the early thirties (for most people), and unless the individual maintains an active lifestyle this leads to weight gain that can lead to diabetes. Weight gain is an issue because there is so much sugar staying in the bloodstream that the pancreas cannot accurately determine how much needs to be added or when. Generally, the pancreas is an active member of the digestive process, but that function is curtailed when there is already too much sugar in a person's bloodstream from previous meals.

Across time, the pancreas becomes increasingly unable to manage the flow of insulin which can lead to diabetes. In the short-term, the individual may feel light headed, have issues with hydration, and other minor medical complaints due to unregulated insulin uptake (Leung, Kamla, Lee, & Mak, 2007). In the long-term, diabetes is a much more critical problem. Data suggests that diabetes is one of the leading causes (if not the leading cause) of a variety of deadly health issues. Heart disease is the number one killer of adults in the United States. Although there are many ways in which this can become a problem among adults, diabetes has become the number one way for individuals to develop heart disease in the United States. Hypertension is also an issue that can be genetic or caused by other problems, but diabetes often leads to a person who would not have been hypertensive becoming so. Hypertension is a major problem because it can lead directly to heart failure. Diabetes mellitus can also lead to kidney failure and has been the main reason for new hospital admissions for kidney related problems in the past decade. However, the main problem people with diabetes complain of is the way that there blood vessels react to a diagnosis of diabetes. People have issues healing because there is a restriction of blood flow related to the disease. Many will also have problems feeling there extremities (called neuropathy) which can lead to further injuries that cannot heal. These two problems are why individuals with diabetes often have amputations later in life. This is a disease which has some short-term detriments, but the long-term consequences of uncontrolled diabetes are much more dire.

People in the United States have trended toward jobs that are more sedentary, as mentioned previously, which has increasingly placed them in danger of contracting diabetes (Schreinemachers, 2006). Diabetes is not a disease that can be translated from person to person like an airborne virus, but there is a familial/genetic predisposition which is suggestive. Families tend to have similar body types, and they also tend to learn patterns of health from those they are most associated with. Obese people are more likely to have obese parents, and families that have an issue with obesity (Case & Paxson, 2005). This is a fact that has been related in more than one study, and it can be seen in these cases that diabetes can actually be translated from family member to family member. Although it is not like the common cold, there could be both a genetic predisposition for people to contract obesity, other poor health habits and diabetes.