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What is Diabetes Mellitus?
Diabetes, more accurately diabetes mellitus, is simply too much sugar, in the form of glucose, in the blood.
Diabetes Mellitus and Blood Glucose Level
After you have eaten, digested and absorbed food containing carbohydrate, the blood glucose level in your body increases. In response the pancreas releases the correct amount of insulin into your blood to carry the extra blood glucose into the cells. The blood glucose levels in your body then returns to its pre-meal level. That's the way the body system is supposed to work.
If you don't have diabetes mellitus, your blood glucose level never goes too high or too low. No matter how much or how little carbohydrate you eat the body system balances the body blood glucose level itself.
Diabetes Mellitus occurs when the body system which controls the blood glucose level no longer works properly.
As a result, glucose builds up in the blood, overflows into the urine, and passes out of the body. Thus, the body loses its main source of fuel even though the blood contains large amounts of glucose.
Insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas, is the key to open the door for glucose to enter the body tissues, muscles, fat tissues and liver. The insulin attached itself to the glucose in the blood and locks itself into the receptor site to allow the glucose to pass through the cell wall into the cell.
Glucose can be used for energy, stored
as glycogen in the liver and muscle or turn into body fat and packed
as fat tissue.
There are 2 main types of Diabetes Mellitus :
- Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus
- Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus
Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus
Type 1 diabetes results from damage or deterioration in pancreatic function that leads to a complete lack of insulin production.
Type 1 diabetes symptom can develop at any age, but is more common in childhood, during the teens or in early adulthood. Type 1 diabetes usually develops in children and juvenile diabetes accounts for 5% to 10% of all diagnosed cases of diabetes mellitus.
If not treated promptly, blood glucose level rises. As the glucose cannot get into the cells, our body begins burning up its fat stores too quickly (ketosis) and our breath smells of acetone. You may vomit, become dehydrated and feel drowsy. Left untreated, you will eventually lapse into a coma.
Type 1 diabetes treatment and diabetes self-care
management is a combination of insulin injection
and a healthy diabetic diet plan.
Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus
Type 2 diabetes mellitus accounts for 90% of American diabetic cases and results from an insufficiency in insulin production and /or a resistance to its action.
Excess body fat restricts the action of insulin carrying glucose into the body's cells resulting in insulin resistance.
The pancreas of a person with insulin resistance is always working overtime. For such a person the essential conversion of glucose into energy take place ineffectively. Thus more insulin is required to convert the glucose, and the pancreas as a result is continuously working overtime to secrete more insulin.
With time, the pancreatic function Type 2 diabetic
patient frequently deteriorates and diabetic medication may need to be
used to help with the control of blood glucose level.
Type 2 diabetes sometimes called "adult onset diabetes" usually develops in people over the age of forty. Over the last decade Type 2 diabetes cases begun to emerge amongst the younger generation due largely to obesity and inactive lifestyles.
A number of factors may influence the development of Type 2 diabetes symptom, most importantly:
- family diabetes history
- age
- overweight
- stress
- alcohol abuse
- inactivity
Type 2 diabetes treatment and diabetic self-care management involves a healthy diabetic diet plan and exercise, diabetic medication or insulin if this is not enough to control the high blood glucose level.
For the obese and overweight person a healthy
diabetic diet plan, losing weight and increased daily physical activity
levels is the most
important part of the diabetes diet self-care.
Diabetes Self-care - The Hidden Danger of Diabetes
Diabetes is a chronic, debilitating, long term disease. It can strike at any age , but it is mostly associated with middle age. Cause of diabetes are both genetic and lifestyle related.
Diabetes affects your quality of life and endanger your health and the presence of diabetes increases the risk of heart disease by about threefold.
Diabetes is also probably the single greatest cause of male impotence and erectile dysfunction affecting diabetic men as diabetes cause vascular disease and nerve damage that directly affects the male diabetic patient ability to achieve erection for sexual intercourse.
Those suffering from diabetes must be on a healthy diabetic diet plan, and with the more severe cases, take regular insulin injections. Untreated, diabetes can lead to blindness, heart attacks, stroke, kidney failure, decreased blood flow in the legs (arterial insufficiency), and decreased sensation (neuropathy) in the feet due to the destruction of sensory nerves. Ultimately, diabetes can lead to gangrene in the feet and amputation or even death.
A healthy diabetic diet plan and diabetes self-care is thus of utmost importance in good day to day control of diabetes.
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