NEW YORK - Every day the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University Medical Center is busy — with new and returning patients.
Director Dr. Robin Goland says its is a major problem in every hospital.
“Ten percent of patients on a medical service in a hospital have diabetes,” she says. “Fifty percent of patients on a vascular surgery service have diabetes.”
Diabetes is the inability to metabolize sugar properly — so it builds up in the blood. Type 1, a genetic disease that usually strikes in childhood, is not increasing. The big change is with Type 2 — caused partly by obesity.
In just a decade, the number of Americans diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes more than doubled to 14.7 million and the government estimates more than 5 million others have it and don’t know it.
