Diabetes

Keywords

Diabetes, diet, insulin, Type 1, Type 2, injection, pump, medication, tablets, pancreas, hormone, islet cell transplant, blood sugar monitor, hyperglycaemia, hypoglycaemia, memory loss, rapid acting, regular acting, long acting, synthetic, pig pancreas, cattle pancreas.

Introduction

Diabetes is a lifelong condition that can cause a person's blood sugar level will become too high. When this happens, your body cannot produce enough insulin, a hormone that controls this sugar level. If it goes any further, the body's immune system attacks the cells that create insulin and destroys them.

Types of Diabetes

There are two main types of diabetes.

As a rule, there are more people that have Type 2 diabetes than Type 1.

Other Types

There are also some other types of diabetes, including gestational diabetes, where a pregnant woman does not create enough insulin, and pre-diabetes, where people may have a higher concentration of blood sugar, but where it is not high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes.

Let's Get Technical

So, we know that it's controlled by insulin. This is created in the pancreas, which is situated behind the stomach. The process is where insulin is taken from the food we digest and placed in your bloodstream where it is broken down to create energy.

If you have diabetes, this process doesn't occur, and this is because there isn't enough insulin in the body to process the energy needed.

Interesting fact: the name diabetes is Greek for "siphon", which refers to the copious amounts of urine in uncontrolled diabetes. The name insulin is from the Latin name insula, or island, because they are secreted from the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.

Type 1

Type 1 diabetes can develop quickly. In a matter of days or weeks. It will need treatment as quickly as possible so your body can function normally. It is where your body does not make the hormone insulin, and this can be fatal if not treated soon.

Type 2 Diabetes

Although classed as not as severe as Type 1, Type 2 diabetes can be controlled by your diet and lifestyle. If you don't look after yourself, you can develop further into Type 1, and then you'll have to take tablets or inject yourself with insulin daily, as well as monitor your blood sugar levels.

Treatments

There's different ways you can treat diabetes, for both types.

For Type 1, you can:

For Type 2, you can:

It's Not Just High Blood Sugars

Diabetes can also affect people who have low blood sugars (hypoglycaemia). When this happens, the blood is redirected to all the major organs to keep them going. This doesn't include the brain, which you would think is a major organ, so it gets left behind.

When this happens, a person with diabetes can have a serious hypo, which in turn can cause quite severe brain damage, and can result in paralysis down the left side (similar to a stroke), memory loss, loss of language use and other effects such as muscle coordination and balance issues.

Types of Insulin

There are different types of insulin that can be taken when you are Type 2. Basically when taken, they take a varied amount of time to work or release into the blood system. They include:

They all peak at varied times too, anywhere between 30 minutes and 12 hours.

How is Insulin Made for Diabetics?

There are a couple of routes for this. The pancreas of a pig or cattle were used to make insulin, and while this may not be used anymore as much, it is still a viable option if needed.

The other route is to create synthetic insulin by using recombinant DNA using two strands of amino acids. They are arranged in a structured sequence.