General Health

Keeping an Eye on Prediabetes

You already know that diabetes can cause serious health complications. Medical experts, however, have learned that prediabetes also causes health complications. To keep yourself safe, learn about the symptoms of prediabetes and find out how you can prevent the disease from affecting your life.

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Symptoms of Prediabetes

Doctors use three tests to determine whether a person has prediabetes

OGTT – oral glucose tolerance test
FPG – fasting plasma glucose test
A1C test

These tests can only help you, though, when you visit the doctor for regular checkups. Schedule an exam at least once a year to make sure that your metabolism falls within normal parameters. This is especially important if you have a family history of diabetes.

You can also take the online test provided by American Diabetes Association to determine whether you have a high risk for diabetes. The online test, however, does not claim to offer a diagnosis, so you should still visit your doctor.

Preventing Prediabetes

Exercise and diet will help you avoid prediabetes. Make sure that you get at least 2.5 hours of physical exercise a week. You don’t have to kill yourself at the gym. Taking time each evening to walk around your neighborhood can do wonders for your health.

Avoid foods that contain a lot of sugar. That includes soft drinks as well as candy and desserts. Eat a broad range of foods, but make sure that most of them come from plants. Including plenty of fruits and vegetables in your diet will only lead to good things.

NASA Space Program Contributed to Medical Technology

Now that NASA has closed its space shuttle program, Americans must wonder whether this will affect their daily lives. Although it’s tempting to create a mental barrier between life on Earth and satellites in space, the fact of the matter is that the space shuttle program had a significant impact on the way that human beings live.

Image via Wikipedia

If you want proof, then just look to field of medical technology.

NASA’s Impact on Medical Technology

Whenever NASA went to work on a tiny (or gigantic) robot arm to manipulate objects in space, the resulting technology had an effect on the way that cutting edge doctors performed surgeries. Without the space program, doctors wouldn’t have much of the medical equipment that they rely on every day. So-called miracles such as hand transplants simply would not exist without scientists working for NASA.

MRI and CT scanners would also sound like science fiction. The technology behind these now-common machines was based on technology used in the space shuttle program.

Public Funding for Private Research

The space program also helped fuel America’s massive medical technology industry. Without government funding, few private medical researchers would have had enough money to invest in the medicines and tools that patients take for granted today.

Now that NASA has closed the space shuttle program, countless other agencies will lose revenue. Instead of making the economy more stable, shutting down the program could have the opposite effect by stifling innovation and preventing scientists from studying the latest developments in medical science.

NASA’s space program offered more than pretty pictures and national pride. It offered health to millions of people. Who knows how medicine will evolve without it.