Find out your diabetes risk and create knowledge

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Chocolates: You can eat without fear of diabetes – if you know your risk. A digital project helps with this

Today I would like to introduce you to the topic “Health for digitalized life” from a really digitalized side: A citizen science project is running at the “German Institute for Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke” (DIfE). Topic: The communication of diabetes risks. Goal: Education about diabetes that people can actually understand.

Diabetes risk of 1 percent: what does that actually mean?

Citizen Science is about large numbers of lay people contributing to the formation of knowledge. The classic example is the annual bird census, NABU’s “Hour of the Garden Birds”, during which the birds in your garden are identified and reported.

With the DIfE project, you are asked to take part in an anonymous online survey that lasts a maximum of 15 minutes. If you look at the questions, you’ll see that it’s about how easy it is to understand percent risk.

Concrete tips as a thank you

Directly connected to this is the “German Diabetes Risk Test”, from which you can then immediately find out how high your personal risk is of developing type 2 diabetes, the age-related diabetes, within the next five years. Based on this, you will receive tips on how to prevent it.

In case you’re thinking now, old age sugar? That’s still not an issue for me! Not even close. Even children get sick sometimes. The reason for this is the massive increase in obesity in recent decades.

As for adults, type 2 diabetes has a strong hereditary component – and the genes are very common. This means that if you do nothing, there is a high probability that diabetes will eventually catch you.

With strong muscles against diabetes

Obesity and lack of exercise in particular are poison for the regulation of the sugar level in the body. This has to do with the muscles and the fatty tissue as well as various messenger substances that are secreted from these tissues. In other words, if you watch your weight as a younger adult and do enough exercise (not just endurance training but also muscle building), you will do everything you can to avoid diabetes later on. At least you can delay such a disease by many years. It also makes sense to deal with your daily sugar consumption. You can find out more in the article “How much sugar a day is healthy?”

Diet and stress also play a role in the onset of type 2 diabetes. You can also find out something about nutritional topics in the Citizen Science project of the DifE. I don’t want to tell you what, because I really want to encourage you to take part.

Personally, I’ve been involved in health risk communication as a profession for ages. And I’ve attended at least five courses in which I’ve refreshed myself on how to use percentages correctly. Nevertheless, I find it extremely difficult to draw a personal lesson from hearing and understanding an abstract number. Because there is no concern.

That’s why I’m curious what you say about this test.

Scientifically based test, simply online

Incidentally, my result was: My risk of developing diabetes in the next five years is around the average for my age group. The healthandthecity sports program, for example the “Learn to jog” project or my various experiments on serenity seem to be paying off.

Back to the Citizen Science project of the DifE. By the way, it is correctly called: “DIRIKO – study on diabetes risk communication with the DIfE – German Diabetes Risk Test.” I recommend you to take part because this test is scientifically the best that is currently available in Germany for diabetes risk .

The DifE developed the test based on the results of a recognized long-term study; the Potsdam EPIC study. A total of 519,000 adult study participants are involved in the EPIC study in ten European countries.

Foot amputation and blindness from diabetes

But I’m not just interested in the solid underlying data. Type 2 diabetes should not be underestimated. I recently did an interview on the subject of diabetic foot. Since then I’ve been on a missionary enlightenment trip. Because every year in Germany alone, 50,000 feet or whole legs are amputated – because of diabetes. Not only that you can no longer walk well or not at all. An alarming number of people die shortly after the amputation – which also has a lot to do with diabetes.

Other possible consequences of diabetes: blindness, kidney failure, heart attack, stroke, to name just the most important ones.

The first bad course in the metabolism is laid decades before diabetes breaks out in the classic sense. And by the time the doctor diagnoses the disease, almost everything in the body has already been irretrievably damaged.

Here is the link to the DIRIKO citizen science project and test.

If you don’t want to take part in the study, but just want to find out about your diabetes risk, you can easily find the diabetes risk test online.

I’m curious to see how you feel about helping to create more health together in a digital way.

The article Find out your diabetes risk and create knowledge appeared first on healthandthecity.

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