'Double Diabetes' a New Threat

SUNDAY, Dec. 3 (HealthDay News) -- Despite the flurry of public service campaigns and education efforts, the diabetes epidemic in the United States continues to escalate out of control.

An estimated 20.8 million Americans -- or 7 percent of the population -- are now believed to be diabetic. Of those, 6.2 million people have the disease but don't know it. And that doesn't include the 41million people with pre-diabetes, a condition in which blood-glucose levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be diagnosed as type 2 diabetes.

In fact, the epidemic has become so pervasive that doctors are now finding patients who suffer frombothtype 1 and type 2 diabetes -- a phenomenon known as "double diabetes" or "hybrid diabetes."

"It's mostly people who have a type 1 diabetes who become overweight and show the profile of a type 2, with obesity and hypertension," said Dr. Stewart Weiss, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine in New York City.

Doctors and health-care experts are urging people to take the steps necessary -- basically proper nutrition and plenty of exercise -- to avoid joining the ranks of those already diagnosed with the disease.

Type 1 diabetes is caused by the body's inability to produce insulin, the hormone that ushers blood sugar -- called glucose -- to cells for energy. An estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of Americans with diabetes have type 1 disease. Type 2 diabetes results from insulin resistance -- the body's inability to properly use the hormone. Most Americans diagnosed with diabetes have type 2 diabetes, and excess weight and lack of exercise are big contributors to this form of the disease.

But, doctors are now seeing strong indications that double diabetes is a growing phenomenon. For instance, recent studies suggest that as many as 30 percent of newly diagnosed diabetes cases among children involve youngsters with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Generally, double-diabetes sufferers will often look as though they have the more common type 2 version because they're overweight. But subsequent blood tests reveal they also have type 1 disease.

Double diabetes takes the suffering caused by the disease a step further, and complicates efforts to treat it.

Type 1 diabetics normally have to take daily injections of insulin to remain healthy, while type 2 diabetics require different medication and regular monitoring of their blood sugar. Doctors now are researching how to juggle treating both types of diabetes in the same patient, Weiss said.

"We have all sorts of medications that address different problems for different types of diabetes," Weiss said. "The question with double diabetes becomes, when can we use the different types of medications and what would be appropriate for different patients?"

Weiss suspects that double diabetes might be caused, in part, by type 1 diabetics who are taking insulin but haven't made the other lifestyle changes necessary to deal with the disease.