Diabetes: A Lifelong Condition
In this day and age there is at least one person in your life that has diabetes. In the United States alone there are more than 23 million U.S. citizens that have a form of diabetes – that’s nearly 10 percent of the population. Yet of that 23 million, 6 million diabetes sufferers will go undiagnosed while every year nearly 2 million people are diagnosed with diabetes. Diabetes – in essence – is a metabolism disorder that affects the way the human body turns digested food into energy and fuel for growth.
When a normal person eats food it is broken down into glucose which is a type of sugar that is carried through the bloodstream as the primary source of fuel for the human body. Once the glucose enters the bloodstream and is absorbed into the body at the cellular level insulin is then needed to help use it. Created in the pancreas, insulin is used to help the glucose be absorbed into the cells. However, in the case of a diabetic patient the pancreas is not producing little or no insulin or in some cases the insulin is not being absorbed into the bloodstream at all. It is then that glucose begins to build up in the body to the point where it must pass through the urinary tract which means that the body suffers from not having enough energy or fuel.
Types of Diabetes
Diabetes comes in three forms: Type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and gestational diabetes. The following is a simple explanation of those forms of diabetes:
Type 1 Diabetes: An autoimmune disease, type 1 diabetes is essentially they body experiencing an inappropriate reaction to the immune system by attacking the beta cells inside the pancreas which produce insulin. When this happens the pancreas has trouble producing insulin and can only produce a little or in many cases no insulin at all. When this happens the diabetic patient must take insulin on a daily basis in order to live. Presently, type 1 diabetes is responsible for upt to 10 percent of all diabetes in the United States.
Type 2 Diabetes: As the most common form of diabetes, type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes and accounts for up to 90 percent of all diagnosed diabetes patients. Type 2 diabetes is associated with the classical understanding of diabetes in that it is tied to the patients family history and genetics, age, obesity, ethnicity and physical inactivity as for the most part 80 percent of all type 2 diabetes is diagnosed in patients that are overweight.
Type 2 diabetes has come to a disturbing change in recent years as more and more children and adolescents are diagnosed with diabetes. When type 2 diabetes is diagnosed it is usually at the end of symptoms developing from the diabetic affects. These symptoms include frequent urination, weight loss, frequent infections, slow healing of sores and wounds, unusual thirst, nausea, and fatigue. However, this is not always the case as there are many type 2 diabetes patients that do not experience any of these symptoms.
Gestational Diabetes: Diagnosed on the glucose levels in the bloodstream, gestational diabetes is diagnosed by measuring how much it has built up in the human body. Gestational diabetes, for the most part, is a type of diabetes that develops only during pregnancy. Gestational diabetes is also more predominant in certain ethnicities and gender, specifically in Hispanic Americans, African Americans, and American Indians as well as women that have a genetic predisposition for diabetes or those that have a family history of diabetes. Commonly those women that develop gestational diabetes go on to develop type 2 diabetes, or have a 20 to 50 percent chance of developing it.
