Metabolic Syndrome and Some Treatment Options

The Methodist Hospital and the University of Houston are doing a joint research on the use of a portable tool to check metabolism to fight obesity and the related complications. John Miller, Physics professor at the University of Houston received a three-year grant to the amount of $623,425.00 from the National Institutes of Health to explore biosensors for obesity and energy balance.

Miller is particularly focusing on metabolic syndrome, a destructive obesity complication that affects 20% of obese people. This increases the likelihood for these people to develop heart disease, obesity and cancer. He wants to develop technologies to sense metabolic activity.

There are drug treatments for this condition but the cost is exorbitant. There is therefore a need to acquire technologies that can help with early diagnosis. This will make the treatment more cost-effective. I am keeping a close eye on the result of this research but I have not seen any report yet.

So meantime it is good to know what are the available treatment options. The first line of defense is lifestyle change. This means to lose weigh when needed and so will involve a diet of healthy food and increased and regular physical exercise.

The next line of treatment are the medicines. The different conditions that comprise the metabolic syndrome are treated differently. But they are all used to control the high blood pressure, blood glucose and triglyceride levels. Sometimes aspirin is recommended in order to avoid blood clots.

To reduce the risk for cardiovascular events is the main purpose of treating the metabolic syndrome. If diabetes has not developed yet, the other purpose of treatment is to delay or prevent the onset of type 2 diabetes. This way the diabetes complications can be avoided.

Some of the risk factors can easily be controlled like being overweight, inactivity and eating the wrong kinds of food. Well, perhaps not easily but with determination, it can be done. And when compared to dealing with complications, give me these controllable risk factors anytime and I will be more than glad to deal with them. They can even be fun like dancing and eating different kinds of food.