alt Hacker NewsIt is all interconnected, but I am unsure about the claim made. The reason is simple: there can be numerous disease types. Person A may have different genetics than Person B, as one example, so responses of a body may be different for that reason alone; then there is lifestyle choice, health, age and so forth. So I don't agree with the claim in the title here that all is one ailment - that makes no sense to me.
Replies
I generally agree. It's all interconnected, and we could point to a singular cause, but to treat them all as one and of the same class of disease seems reductive and not useful.
Though, to be play devil's advocate for a second, it does seem that diabetes is typically where the symptoms start, and we do understand that diabetes is fundamentally metabolic and/or functional dysfunction in 1 or more of 7-ish different areas.
I think it's the level of perspective zoom + timing we take that makes the article's assertion either useful or not.
If we zoom out, while catching disease early on, and we address the metabolic conditions via lifestyle and/or certain drugs like GLP1, then we prevent the need to intervene on the kidney and cardiac front.
But if we zoom in to a specific issue, after disease has progressed a profound amount, a GLP1 intervention may be too little, too late.
Hopefully though, this may help the messaging to folks that if they are contending with metabolic disease that presents as diabetes, introducing lifestyle and pharma interventions early may be helpful on the larger epidemiological front.
We are reasonably confident that diabetes causes heart and kidney disease. However the converse - if I have heart disease (or kidney) I also have diabetes is not true: there are many possible causes of heart or kidney disease.
This logic error is easy to make, and the headlines all too often imply it, but it isn't always true (sometimes it is).