Diabetes is a diagnosis that stays with you for the rest of your life. But by taking the right measures early on, people with diabetes can live longer and healthier.
According to the National Institutes of Health, people who have type 1 diabetes who intensively control their blood sugar early in their illness are likely to outlive those who do not.
“The outlook for people with type 1 diabetes continues to improve,” said
Catherine Cowie, Ph.D., of NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, which funded the study, released in 2015. “These results show that by tightly controlling their blood glucose, people with type 1 diabetes can live longer.”
Once known as “juvenile diabetes”, type 1 typically affects younger people and occurs when the body does not make insulin. People who have type 1 must take daily doses of insulin to live.