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Diabetes Control: Insights from Complexity Science

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Handbook of Systems and Complexity in Health

Abstract

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a global expansion in the prevalence of diabetes. This expansion resulted from generally increasing life expectancy, and from ‘diabetogenic’ lifestyles and environments associated with reduced physical activity and increased calorie intake. All stages of the development of type 2 diabetes are associated with raised risk of cardiovascular disease, a fact that threatens to reverse the improving trend in cardiovascular mortality of recent decades in most world populations. At the same time, the incidence of the less common type 1 diabetes (which is usually triggered by auto-immune mechanisms) also increased.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An ‘off the record’ comment from a qualitative research participant with type 1 diabetes, University of Warwick, 2004.

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Correspondence to Tim A. Holt PhD, MRCP, FRCGP .

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Holt, T.A. (2013). Diabetes Control: Insights from Complexity Science. In: Sturmberg, J., Martin, C. (eds) Handbook of Systems and Complexity in Health. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4998-0_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4998-0_20

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