Diabetes is a chronic disease indicated by high levels of sugar in the blood and it can be said as a permanent disease. Diabetes highly influenced by insulin, a hormone formed by the pancreas to control blood sugar. Diabetes can be caused by too little insulin, body resistance to insulin, or both. If you want to know about diabetes, it is essential to first understand the normal process of digestion system by which food is processed and used by the body for energy. When the food is digested, glucose comes into the bloodstream. It is a source of energy for the body. Then the pancreas makes insulin to move glucose from the bloodstream into muscle, fat, and liver cells, where it can be used as energy. In diabetes case, people with diabetes have high blood sugar. This makes their pancreas does not make enough insulin and their muscle, fat, and liver cells do not respond to insulin normally.
People do tend to see diabetes as one kind of disease while actually there are three types of diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is recognized in childhood. In this type of diabetes, the cause is mainly because the body makes little or no insulin. Thus, people who suffer from diabetes type 1 need daily injections of insulin. Type 2 diabetes can be said as the most common case. It usually occurs in adulthood because the pancreas does not make enough insulin to keep the blood sugar level normal. The third type is gestational diabetes. It is caused by high blood glucose that develops at any time during pregnancy even in a woman who does not have diabetes. This kind of diabetes can lead to the type 2 diabetes and also cardiovascular disease.
In the most common cases, many hazard factors are influencing the development of type 2 diabetes. It is usually diagnosed:
- in people with age over 45 years
- people with family members having diabetes, either it the parents, brother, or sister
- mothers who deliver a baby weighing more than 9 pounds or 4 kg
- people with heart disease, obesity polycysctic ovary disease (in women) and high blood cholesterol level
- some ethnic groups also have higher risk of suffering from type 2 diabetes such as African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Hispanic Americans.
