Help Appreciated, Working on Student Project.

[Kidcov88]

Hi guys i've joined this forum to try to get some help in getting answers to some specific questions about diabetes. My name is James and I'm studying design for advertising at University of the Arts London.

I am currently working on a brief for Diabetes UK to increase awareness and prevention of type 2 diabetes in people of 18-30 in the UK. This is a University project however these will then be presented to the client and possibly used for their next campaign.

One approach I have been considering is making people aware of the type 2 symptoms could in some cases be easily ignored, or mistaken for other things.
Some questions I was hoping I might be able to get some clarification on are:

How much of a problem is type 2 diabetes for people of 18-30? Most materials I have read suggest it is most common in later life.

Do the symptoms slowly develop over time. Would these symptoms be experienced by people of this age group.

Do you feel it would help for people to be made more aware of the symptoms of diabetes?

Alternatively if anyone knows somewhere I can get in touch with to get more information from a research based perspective rather than as a patient that would be really helpful too.

Many thanks, any help anyone can give me will be much appreciated.

 

[sugarless sue]

Welcome to the forum ,James.I hope you get some useful input to your questions.i am not in your age bracket(I wish) but I had none of the classic symptoms before diagnosis!!I went to the doctors with stress and came out with diabetes,sort of buy one get one free!

 

[Dennis]

Hi James,

Like Sue I am well outside your age group, as will be around 95% of all type 2s.

I found this that might be of interest to you.
www.ealingpct.nhs.uk/Library/JSNA/3.3.3%20Diabetes.doc

In particular have a look at section 1.4, fig.5. It deals only with the Ealing PCT area, but extrapolate those figures out for the whole population and you will get an idea of the relatively low numbers of diabetics in your target age group.

 

[Trinkwasser]

http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/

Jenny refers to many classic papers.

For more than you ever wanted to know

http://www.mendosa.com/

The big problem is, if you fail to follow DUK's prejudices you will probably fail your assignment.

IME Type 2 is highly genetic. A small but significant proportion of sufferers have symptoms going back to childhood which are often ignored when they do not demonstrate Type 1 (someone I know actually failed a Glucose Tolerance test as a child and her parents were told to give her a low carb diet without being told why. She didn't rediscover the fact that she was actually diabetic until AFTER her first heart attack). Many patients probably have diabetes, or at least prediabetes, for ten years or more before being diagnosed, and already have significant damage. it is NOT caused by being fat and lazy, more often than not the fatness and lazyness is a symptom of carbohydrate intolerance, which came first. 20% of Type 2s are not overweight. 80% of obese people are not diabetic.

Two good papers, one old one new, about the Diabetic Progression

http://www.medscape.com/viewprogram/145

http://www.medscape.com/viewprogram/6744

Medscape needs you to register but they don't spam you. The CME papers are mostly summations of "What every doctor should know" written by experts in their field BUT check the Discolsures at the end, some of them are little more than advertising puffs for one or another drug company.

The "epidemic" of Type 2, obesity and cardiovascular disease has followed hot on the heels of the adoption of the Heart Healthy diet, which clearly isn't.

 

[Kidcov88]

After quite a bit of research I think I am going to look at encouraging 18-30's to change aspects of their diet, exercise pattern etc to prevent the levels of type 2 growing and educate people on the risks (quite a difficult task).

Just wanted to say thanks for the help thus far and I will probably be posting some developments on the forum to try and get some opinion on the nature and tone of the campaign,

James.