Diabetes

Diabetes

                  When you eat, your body breaks down food into glucose in your small intestine. This is your body’s source of energy for everything it does, from working and thinking to exercising and healing. Glucose travels trough your bloodstream, looking for individual cells that need energy. For glucose to get into the cells it requires insulin. Insulin is the key that unlocks cells for glucose to enter and deliver energy. Insulin is normally produced in the pancreas by specialized cells called BETA-cells.  When glucose enters your bloodstream, the pancreas releases the right amount of insulin to move glucose into your cells. In people with diabetes, this process doesn´t work as it should.

                  Sugar or glucose is the major fuel of every single cell of the body, but even more important it’s almost the only source of energy of brain cells. In very simple way to see it diabetes is a persistent elevation of glucose in our body; which means glucose is not being used properly to produce energy.

When glucose can’t get into cells, either because there isn´t enough insulin or because the body is resisting it, glucose begins to build up in the bloodstream. As a result, all that energy is wasted. It does not get to cells where it is needed. Without glucose in your cells, they lack the energy they require to keep your body working. To keep glucose from building up in the bloodstream an external supply of insulin may be needed.

                  There are two major type of diabetes: type 1 and type 2. Until recently type 1 Diabetes was called juvenile diabetes because it was more commonly diagnosed in children and young adults. Type 1 diabetes occurs when the B-cells of the pancreas that produce insulin have been destroyed by immune cells produced by our own body. Everyone diagnosed with type 1 diabetes must take injections of insulin everyday if they want to survive. Of the two major type of diabetes type 1 is much less common than type 2. Only about 5-10% of all diabetics have type 1.  Type 2 diabetes is much more prevalent. 90-95% diabetics have type 2 diabetes.

There are several risk factors for type 2 diabetes including family history, high cholesterol and high blood pressure; but the leading cause of type 2 diabetes, is obesity, and 80-90% of people with this type of diabetes are overweight. Other risk factors include race and ethnicity. For example, Hispanics and African Americans are two times more likely to develop diabetes than Caucasians. Because symptoms of type 2 diabetes are very uncertain people can go for years without being diagnosed until a bigger complication arise.

A third type of diabetes can develop in women within pregnancy. In most cases gestational diabetes ends after the mother gives birth.

Type 1 and type 2 diabetes have similar complications. In both cases diabetics tend to produce excessive urine, they have neuropathies and have wounds that are slow to heal. Without appropriate treatment Diabetes can lead to high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, blindness, infections and foot amputations.

Despite the best efforts of researchers and doctors from all over the world there is currently no known cure for diabetes. The care and treatment of diabetes has been intensely improved in the last years making it a disease you can learn to live with. Oral drugs, insulin, healthy diet, exercise and other healthy habits can prevent you of having diabetes no matter how much family history of diabetes you have.