What is Diabetes?

According to the report from the International Diabetes Institute of Australia, victims of diabetes worldwide have increased more than twice and expected to grow from its current 246 million to 380 million by year 2025.

Diabetes is now actually a pandemic.  Roughly 4.6 percent of the population in the Philippines (or about 3.5 million) are diabetics.  Not included in these statistics are the 4% to 5% who are undiscovered and about 8 percent pre-diabetics, or future diabetics.  All these predicted to be twice as many in two decades.  More than 65 percent of diabetics will die of some form of heart disease or stroke. These are indeed scary statistics.

What is diabetes?
Diabetes is a condition where the amount of glucose in your blood is too high because the body cannot use it properly.  This is because your pancreas does not produce any insulin, or not enough, to help glucose enter your body's cells - or the insulin that is produced does not work properly (known as insulin resistance).

What causes diabetes?
When our food is digested the glucose makes its way into our bloodstream.  Our cells use the glucose for energy and growth.  However, glucose cannot enter our cells without insulin being present - insulin makes it possible for our cells to take in the glucose.

Insulin is a hormone that is produced by the pancreas that allows glucose to enter the body's cells, where it is used as fuel for energy so we can work, play and generally live our lives.  

After eating, the pancreas automatically releases an adequate quantity of insulin to move the glucose present in our blood into the cells, and lowers the blood sugar level.

A person with diabetes has a condition in which the quantity of glucose in the blood is too elevated (hyperglycemia).  This is because the body either does not produce enough insulin, produces no insulin, or has cells that do not respond properly to the insulin the pancreas produces.  This results in too much glucose building up in the blood.  This excess blood glucose eventually passes out of the body in urine.  So, even though the blood has plenty of glucose, the cells are not getting it for their essential energy and growth requirements.

Why is it called Diabetes Mellitus?
Diabetes comes from Greek, and it means a siphon.  Aretus the Cappadocian, a Greek physician during the second century A.D., named the condition diabainein.  He described patients who were passing too much water (polyuria) - like a siphon.  The word became "diabetes" from the English adoption of the Medieval Latin diabetes.

In ancient China people observed that ants would be attracted to some people's urine, because it was sweet.  The term "Sweet Urine Disease" was coined.

Types of diabetes There are three types of diabetes:

Diabetes Type 1 - You produce no insulin at all.
Diabetes Type 2 - You don't produce enough insulin, or your insulin is not working properly.
Gestational Diabetes - You develop diabetes just during your pregnancy.

Diabetes Types 1 and 2 are chronic medical conditions - this means that they are persistent and perpetual.  Gestational Diabetes usually resolves itself after the birth of the child.

Treatment
All types of diabetes are treatable, but Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes last a lifetime; there is no known cure.  The patient receives regular insulin, which became medically available in 1921.  The treatment for a patient with Type 1 is mainly injected insulin, plus some dietary and exercise adherence.

Patients with Type 2 are usually treated with tablets, exercise and a special diet, but sometimes insulin injections are also required.

If diabetes is not adequately controlled the patient has a significant higher risk of developing complications, such as hypoglycemia, ketoacidosis, and nonketotic hypersosmolar coma.  Longer term complications could be cardiovascular disease, retinal damage, chronic kidney failure, nerve damage, poor healing of wounds, gangrene on the feet which may lead to amputation, and erectile dysfunction.