Nutrition and Diabetes: Pathophysiology and Management PDF

Preface

Diabetes and obesity are two common disorders that have come to be appropriately recognized as enormous burdens both to the afflicted individuals, their countries, and the modern society in general. What is most striking is the relationship between obesity and impaired glucose regulation that predominantly results in overt diabetes. Consequently, as the incidence of obesity has risen in virtually every population, so has the prevalence of type 2 diabetes. Perhaps more alarming is the trend of increased incidence of obesity and type 2 diabetes among children. When one considers that both disorders are by nature chronic and tend to be associated with a host of complications, it becomes quite obvious how they can become the bane of today's world.

The purpose of Nutrition and Diabetes: Pathophysiology and Management is to provide a unique forum that highlights the link between the problems of obesity and diabetes, albeit various aspects of each disorder are separately discussed in different sections of the book. However, the interrelationships of the various areas of the disease processes become quite apparent in the many overlaps among the contents of many topics covered in this book. Enormous efforts have been made by the different contributors in each section of the book to first provide an overview of each topic, then discuss the mechanistic aspects of the given problem, and to finally link the pathophysiological processes to the treatment. The book is divided into three sections: Pathophysiology and Treatment of Obesity; Pathophysiology and Treatment of Diabetes; and The Role of Oxidative Stress in the Pathogenesis and Treatment of Diabetic Complications. Each section begins with an introduction.

Nutrition and Diabetes: Pathophysiology and Management is intended to be a reference handbook for physicians, nutritionists, and other health-care workers who deal daily with the various problems associated with obesity and diabetes. Researchers who need to see the gaps that still need to be filled in our understanding of the disease processes, as well as strategies for drug development for effective management of the problems, will find the book to be of significant interest. The book should also be of significant interest to public-policy makers involved in formulating health policies, especially in developing countries. Finally, by reading this book, individual subjects afflicted with either obesity or diabetes or both would learn a lot about how to help themselves and about understanding the basis of the treatment provided by their health-care team.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to a lot of people who have helped in my career in different ways. First, I would like to thank all my former teachers, particularly Professor Vincent Marks and John E. Gerich, M.D., who inspired in me the love of metabolic and diabetes research at the University of Surrey and the Mayo Clinic, respectively. I am also greatly indebted to Vay Liang W. Go, M.D., presently of the University of California Los Angeles, for giving me the opportunity to work with him at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, and for his continued mentorship in my academic career. Secondly, I would like to express my gratitude to all my former students and fellows at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, who have helped to shape my career by making seminal contributions to my research. Some of these former trainees of mine, such as Dr. Marc Garfinkel, director of islet transplantation at the University of Chicago, and Dr. William Kendall of the Duke University Medical Center, who are now among my best friends, deserve special mention. I am also particularly grateful to another one, Marcus Darrabie, currently a medical student at Duke, who helped with the illustrations used in my chapters in this book.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the great patience, personal sacrifice, and unqualified support of my wife, Clarice, and our four children, Ogechi, Chiedu, Chucky, and Ike. I am eternally grateful to them for giving me the luxury of extended periods of time away from home in my career and during the preparation of this book. I wish to dedicate this book to my parents, Eugene and Caroline (deceased), for their sacrifices in providing me a most rewarding education that prepared me for an academic career and for their love and support for what I do.