Brought to you by Health Promotion Board

Find out your risk of diabetes

Have you been eating well, exercising, getting enough sleep and generally keeping your health in-check? It’s great that you are taking the right steps to lower your chances of getting diabetes but you could be missing an important point: Knowing your actual risk of contracting this worldwide epidemic.

Sounds scary? It is, because the number of diabetics in Singapore is projected to increase without intervention. What’s worse is that 14 per cent of Singaporeans, aged between 18 to 69, are also living with pre-diabetes and they don’t even know it because there are no obvious signs and symptoms for this condition, and you won’t find out you have it unless a blood test is done.

The pre-cursor to actual diabetes, pre-diabetes means that your blood sugar is elevated beyond what is the acceptable norm. Read on to see if you could be one of them!

Did you know?

Normal blood sugar is up to 6 mmol/l when fasting, or up to 8.7 mmol/l after a meal. When your blood glucose is considered higher than normal but is not high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes, that is when you have pre-diabetes. Without intervention, pre-diabetes could eventually develop into full-blown diabetes, which is when your blood sugar is above 7 mmol/l when fasting, or 12.2 mmol/l after a meal.

Sugar Overload

Diabetes happens when our bodies become incapable of coping with the sugar load in our system. To lower the glucose in our blood, our pancreas produces the sugar-lowering hormone insulin. However, when it is still insufficient to handle the sugar load, insulin resistance develops, causing our blood sugar to become elevated.

Managing Your Health

Before you panic, here is the good news: You can do something about it. With the right lifestyle changes and diet modifications, you can take the bull by the horns and even reverse your pre-diabetes diagnosis if it is caught early enough.

Ignoring diabetes and leaving it uncontrolled can result in various complications, but assessment tools like the 2-minute online Diabetes Risk Assessment can help you assess your risk of developing diabetes and plays a vital role in ensuring you stay on top of your health.

By knowing what is going on with your body, you can take charge of it and remain in the pink of health for years to come. Here’s how you can BEAT diabetes:

  1. Be Aware
  2. Eat Right
  3. Adopt An Active Lifestyle
  4. Take Control

Find out your risk of diabetes