With a shortage of medicines that just began to appear in the panorama, in 2013 diabetes claimed the lives of 11,459 Venezuelans, 1,528 more than the previous year.To be in fifth place among the 25 main causes of death diagnosed in the country, it became the third cause, behind heart disease and cancer, according to the 2013 mortality yearbook, the most recent published publishedby the Ministry of Health.
An inexorable indication that the number of deaths by diabetes will get worse when the most recent data is disseminated is the lack of medicines for the treatment of diabetics.“We will see more people dying.There are no insulins, pills or reactive strips.Not having adequate treatment, glycemia rises, the person dehydrates and the balance of the organism is altered.And then they transfer it to an emergency where there are no adequate physiological solutions or have no insulins, ”warns BRAJKOVICH, president of the Venezuelan Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism.
Diabetes, when not treated, causes renal, ocular and cardiac damage."Diabetics who also have hypertension are nine times more likely to have a heart attack or suffer from heart failure."
The complication could even bring these patients to swell another list that does not need aggregates: that of deaths from heart disease, which continues to lead the causes of death in the country.30,899 people died in 2013 due to heart conditions and 11,164 due to cerebrovascular diseases, both intimately related.
"At that time we had several kinds of medicines and medical-surgical material and we could solve in an acceptable way-although not optimal-the vast majority of cases," says the Cardiology Society in a statement.
The lack of diagnostic reagents, damaged hemodynamics equipment, and the few electrostimulation equipment available in hospitals, makes the prognosis of cardiologists better than that of Brajkovich."We are treating myocardial infarctions, the main cause of death in Venezuela, as we did in 1980, when there were no thrombolitics or stents or acute angioplasties," they say in the statement.
For that year, infarction mortality was 15%.In 2013, the infarcted were 13.77% of the deceased.
This is added to this 6 out of 10 hypertensive that can have a stroke, and that multiply in statistics if they are also not being treated pharmacologically.“To that is added that patients are not diet, they do not sleep well for the concerns, they are stressed, and that they have no how to recreate.They are factors that are influencing the quality of life of people, ”says María Luisa del Moral, of the Venezuelan Society of Neurology.
Episodic and paroxysmal disorders follow at the bottom of the 25 causes of death in Venezuela, but the neurologist believes there may be a rebound.“In a convulsive crisis, which can last more than 15 minutes, the patient can die from cardiorespiratory arrest.When we do not have anticonvulsant medication, as is the case now, patients may have almost daily crises, ”says morality.
Other evils for which the treatments began to be scarce two years ago, and whose foul has only been sharpened, are also included in the list of the mortality yearbook: chronic diseases of the lower respiratory tract, in ninth place with 2.89%;septicemia, in the seventeenth place with 0.62%;and epilepsy closes the count with 0.33% of the diagnoses.
"It is the third yearbook in which Alzheimer's disease (0.34%) is maintained among the top 25 causes that also appears the demographic transition through which the Venezuelan population is going through,"indicate in the report.
