What is diabetes and how does it develop?
Quite probably, some of you’ve already been diagnosed with diabetes, and, many of you who don’t have this disease would like to prevent it.
But before you’re able to manage or prevent diabetes successfully, you must have complete knowledge about this disease. In this article, I am going to write about different forms of diabetes mellitus in a simple language.
One thing that you must know is that long before a diagnosis of diabetes, there is pre-diabetes, especially, in patients who are older and are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. I’d like to direct you to my article about pre-diabetes. This is a must read article for anybody who would like to understand diabetes prevention better.
How is diabetes diagnosed?
There are three ways to diagnose diabetes:
HbA1c
HbA1c or A1c shows the average blood sugar level for approximately the past 3 months. To measure this value you will need a blood work-up, which doesn’t need to be fasting. This is a good test for individuals who don’t like to fast.
Diabetes is diagnosed if an individual has an A1c value of 6.5% or higher.
Fasting glucose
The second method to diagnose diabetes is to measure fasting glucose. Fasting means that an individual should not eat anything (except water) for at least 8 hours.
In this case, diabetes is diagnosed if an individual has a fasting glucose of 126 mg/dl and above.
Glucose tolerance test
This is the more complex method among all of the methods and is, therefore, seldom used. A patient receives a specially prepared sweet drink and his sugar is measured before and 2 hours after drinking this fluid.
The patient is diagnosed with diabetes if the sugar value 2 hours after drinking the sweet drink is equal to or above 200 mg/dl.
In general, diabetes is classified into three classes,
1) Type 1
2) Type 2
3) Gestational
Type 1 diabetes
This form of diabetes is mostly diagnosed in children and younger adults. Only a small percentage (5%) of the entire diabetic population has type 1 diabetes. These patients cannot produce insulin and therefore, are completely insulin dependent. There are multiple theories how children and younger adults end up with type 1 diabetes. But whatever the reasons such as immune system induced or unknown, the insulin producing organ called the pancreas gets damaged. Damage to this organ affects and most of the time eliminates insulin production.
What is insulin?
Insulin is a hormone that functions as a pusher. It pushes sugar into the cells. Without this hormone, sugar can’t enter the body organs such as the liver and muscles. This is why diabetic patients have high blood sugar levels.
Type 2
This is the so-called adult type diabetes and is mostly diagnosed in older individuals. This form of the disease is the most common one and almost 95% of the entire diabetic population is diagnosed with this condition. The patients with the type 2 form of this disease still produce insulin but their organs are resistant to this hormone. Therefore, these organs don’t let the insulin get into their territory and subsequently, no sugar will enter into their cells to get processed.
Gestational diabetes
This form of diabetes is first diagnosed during pregnancy. These patients have no sign of blood glucose abnormality prior to being pregnant. The reasons for this disease are mostly because of increased insulin resistance (as explained previously) and production of hormones by the placenta that result in high blood sugar levels. These hormones are growth hormones, progesterone and lactogen.
Patients with this form of diabetes are at risk of having preeclampsia (characterized by high blood pressure and damage to organs such as the kidneys during the pregnancy), newborns with excessive body weight and breathing problems of the newborn.
Essential information
It is important to know that those patients who have been diagnosed with gestational diabetes are at higher risk to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Therefore, anybody who is diagnosed with this form of diabetes should work on risk factors for diabetes on continuous basis. This is the only way to prevent additional problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and stroke later in life.
Another important issue is that patients diagnosed with gestational diabetes can have a pregnancy without serious complications and deliver a healthy baby as long as their condition is recognized and managed accordingly.
The American Diabetes Association has also useful information about diabetes and its management.
At end of this article, let me ask you the following question:
Which one of the following forms of diabetes is the most common in our society?
1) Type 1
2) Type 2
3) Gestational
4) None of above
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