Since Diabetes is such a complex disease with many different forms, I decided to focus on diabetes type I. This is known as insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM). This type of diabetes includes people who are dependant on injections of insulin on a daily basis in order to satisfy the bodies insulin needs, they cannot survive without these injections. In order to understand the disease you need to know about insulin.
Insulin is a hormone. The role of insulin is to convert the food we eat into various useful substances, discarding everything that is wasteful. It is the job of insulin to see that the useful substances are put to best use for our well-being. The useful substances are used for building cells, are made ready for immediate expenditure as energy and also stored for later energy expenditure. Insulin comes from the beta cells which are located in the pancreas.
In the case of diabetes type I almost all of the beta cells have been destroyed. Therefore daily injections of insulin become essential to life. The cause of diabetes is an absolute or lack of the hormone insulin. As a result of this lack of insulin the processes that involve converting the foods we eat into various useful substances does not occur.
One of the products that is of vital importance in our bodies is glucose, a simple carbohydrate sugar which is needed by virtually every part of our body as fuel to function. Insulin controls the amount of glucose distributed to vital organs and also the muscles. In diabetics due to the lack of insulin and therefore the control of glucose given to different body parts they face death if they don’t inject themselves with insulin daily. Since strict monitoring of diabetes is needed for the control of the disease, little room is left for carelessness. As a result, diabetic patients are susceptible to many other diseases and ser-ious conditions if a proper course of treatment is not followed. Other diseases a diabetic is open to: Cardiovascular disease, stroke, Peripheral artery disease, gangrene, kidney disease, blindness, hypertension, nerve damage, impotence etc.
Basically there is an increased incident of infection in diabetic sufferers. Therefore, special care needs to be taken to decrease the chances of getting these other serious diseases. It obvious that there are many very complicated issues associated with diabetes which cannot be explained at this stage. Therefore much more research is required and it’s only a matter of time for these complications to resolved.
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