HUMAN BODY FACTS

When you or someone you love has diabetes, you discover that you must think about a part of life that others take for granted. Your never-changing goal becomes reaching a subtle balance between glucose and insulin. The more learn about diabetes, the better you can be at your balancing act, and the richer your life shared with this chronic disease can be.

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.

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.

All people with diabetes have one thing in common. They have too much sugar, or glucose, in their blood. People with very high or poorly controlled blood glucose level share many similar symptoms.

People with type 2 diabetes may also experience leg pain that may indicate nerve damage or poor circulation. Many people with type 1 diabetes and some people with type 2 diabetes also find that they lose weight even though are hungrier than usual and are eating more.