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  • Diabetes refers to a set of several different diseases. The most common types of diabetes are type 1, or immune-mediated diabetes mellitus, and type 2, or insulin - resistant diabetes mellitus. A third type of diabetes, gestational diabetes mellitus, occurs during some pregnancies.

    All types of diabetes have similar symptoms, because all forms of the disease result in too much sugar, or glucose, in the blood. This is because your body is unable to remove glucose from your blood and deliver in to the cells in your body. Your cells use glucose as a source of energy in order to say alive. But the reasons why your body cannot use glucose from the blood are different for type 1 and type 2 diabetes. 

    People with type 1 diabetes do not make enough insulin.  Insulin is a small protein made by the pancreas that helps the body use or store glucose from food. People with type 1 diabetes can be treated with injections of insulin. In contrast, people with type 2 diabetes, like women with gestational diabetes, do make insulin, but for some reason, the cells in their bodies are resistant to insulin's action or they don't make enough insulin. In all types of diabetes, if glucose does not get into the cells and tissues that need it, it accumulates in the blood. 

    About half of all cases of type 1 diabetes appear in childhood or in the early teenage years. For this reason, it used to be called juvenile-onset diabetes. If your symptoms first appeared during the early teenage years, your doctor probably suspected diabetes right away. If you were a young child when the disease developed, it might have occurred so fast that you went into a coma, before anyone suspected diabetes. Type 2 diabetes most often develops in adulthood and used to be called adult-onset diabetes. Usually, it does not appear suddenly. Instead, you may have no noticeable symptoms or only mild symptoms for years before diabetes is detected, perhaps during a routine exam or blood test. Gestational diabetes only appears during pregnancy in women with no previous history of type 1 or type 2 diabetes and goes away after pregnancy. Pregnant women are tested for gestational diabetes.

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