According to a new Northwestern Medicine study when type-2 diabetic patients are diagnosed with cancer they focus more on their cancer treatment and ignore diabetes care unless proper education is provided to them that ignoring diabetes care can be a dangerous threat to life, reports Science Daily.
If high blood sugar is not controlled it affects the body's immune system and as a result the body cannot fight cancer as effectively it could. Hence proper education of diabetic care must be provided to those who are diagnosed of cancer and type-2 diabetes.
"People with diabetes hear cancer and they think that it is a death sentence, so who cares about diabetes at this point?" said June McKoy, M.D., director of geriatric oncology at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. "But if they're not careful, it's the diabetes that will take them out of this world, not the cancer. That's why this education is so critical when cancer comes on board. Patients must take care of both illnesses."
It was found that people who took care of diabetes along with cancer by getting regular checkups and checking the sugar levels in the body more often had fewer visits to the emergency rooms and lesser health care costs compared to those who ignored or were not provided with proper education on controlling blood sugar, says a report in Science Daily.
"If you are not taking good care of your diabetes, your cancer suffers, too," McKoy said.
According to the report in Science Daily, during the study, researchers observed health records of five years data involving 166,000 commercial insurance patients and 56,000 Medicare Advantage patients.
Most of these cancer patients were provided with diabetes education and as a result 65.2 percent of cancer patients checked their hemoglobin a-1c twice and 88 percent tested at least once in three years. And the group who were given proper education on controlling sugar levels had 416 emergency room visits in a period of three years while 463 visits for those who did not get the education. And the number was higher for hospital admissions among the uneducated group which went up to 883 while the educated group had 658 admissions.
"If you don't have the power of education, you are flailing in the wind," McKoy said, according to Science Daily. "You have to get this information and physicians really need to be information brokers for our patients. Having diabetes and then getting cancer can be overwhelming."
