About Diabetes

Written by Karen Major

The formal name for diabetes is diabetes mellitus and it is actually a group of ailments that have to do with blood glucose levels. But what exactly is it? You hear the word diabetes often whenever people are talking about health issues, whether they are talking of others or themselves. This is a disease that is on the rise and with so many people developing problems with their blood glucose, it’s important to understand the disease.

Blood Glucose

Blood glucose is an important fuel for your body, nourishing the cells in your muscles and tissues. For a variety of reasons, blood glucose, or blood sugar as it is most often called, can get beyond the helping stage as something causes your body to produce more than your body can handle. This can be a life threatening situation.

When your body is producing and dealing with glucose normally, your food and liver produce the glucose, digestion takes it into the bloodstream and your body produces a substance called insulin that takes the glucose into the cells. The pancreas produces the insulin, which is actually a hormone, and sends it into your blood stream.

Once in the blood stream the insulin helps the glucose or sugar enter your cells and lowers the amount of sugar in your blood stream. As the blood sugar lowers in your blood, the body slows the production of insulin.

In the meantime, your liver acts as a storage unit for your blood glucose, or sugar, and if you don’t eat when you normally should the liver releases some of the sugar from storage. This keeps your glucose level within a normal range and feeds your muscle and tissue cells.

Types of Diabetes

There are several types of diabetes; including diabetes type one and diabetes type two. Both of these are chronic diseases that occur when the body is unable to process the blood glucose and the blood ends up with an extremely high blood glucose count.

There are also two types of the disease that can be reversible. One type is referred to as pre-diabetes. This means there is a higher than normal blood glucose count, but it’s not extremely high as in types one and two. Gestational diabetes is a type of diabetes that starts during pregnancy and can also be reversed.

Type One Diabetes

In type one, the pancreas makes so little insulin, the body can’t use the blood glucose as energy. The type one diabetes is caused when your immune system runs amok and attacks the insulin producing cells in the pancreas, mistaking them for the harmful bacteria it usually attacks. This leaves your body with little or no insulin and the sugar, or glucose, stays in your blood stream.

A type one diabetic needs to take insulin every day, usually in the form of a shot. The amount of insulin required is monitored by testing the blood.

Type Two Diabetes

This condition is where the body either makes too little insulin, or is unable to use the insulin it makes to turn blood glucose into energy. People diagnosed with this type of diabetes will often need to take diabetes pills or insulin injections. Type two diabetes is the most common form of the disease.

Both type two diabetes and pre-diabetes are caused when your body cells resist the insulin. Your pancreas is unable to produce enough insulin to overcome the resistance so sugar builds up in the blood stream. No one is sure why this happens, but the thoughts are an excess of fat, most importantly the fat around the abdomen and lack of activity, are both important issues.

Pre-Diabetes

Pre-diabetes is the early stage of type two diabetes. It means the blood glucose levels are higher than normal, but not critical enough to be diagnosed as diabetes. Often people with pre-diabetes can change their diet, become more physically active and manage their weight in order to avoid getting type two diabetes.

Gestational Diabetes

This type of diabetes occurs in pregnant women who’ve never had diabetes before. In gestational diabetes, the placenta produces hormones to take care of the pregnancy and these hormones cause the body’s cells to be more resistant to the insulin.

As the placenta grows larger during the middle and end of the pregnancy, it produces more of those hormones and the cells become more resistant, making it impossible for the pancreas to keep up with the insulin production. When this happens, not enough glucose gets into the cells and too much glucose, or sugar, stays in the blood stream.

Secondary Health Issues For Diabetics

Other health problems associated with diabetes are high blood pressure, high levels of LDL or bad cholesterol, as well as low levels of HDL or good cholesterol, and high levels of triglycerides-fat in the blood. When all these are combined with obesity they are thought to cause resistance to insulin. It certainly pays to keep a check on your blood glucose, or blood sugar, levels. It also pays to eat healthy and exercise regularly to keep diabetes mellitus at bay.