diabets

Diabetes
By Jonathan Gomez

Diabetes is a disease in which your body is unable to properly use and store glucose. Glucose backs up in the bloodstream making your sugar to rise too high.
In Type I diabetes, your body stops producing any insulin, a hormone that lets your body use glucose found in foods for energy. People with Type I diabetes must take daily insulin injections to live. You usually get this kind of diabetes when you’re a kid or young adult, but can happen at any age. In Type II diabetes, the body produces insulin, but not enough to properly convert food into energy. This kind of diabetes usually happens in people who are over 40, overweight, and have a family history of diabetes.
People with diabetes experience symptoms. Some of the symptoms are being very thirsty, having to go to the bathroom very frequently, losing weight, more hungry, bad vision, skin infections, wounds that don't heal, and/or extreme unexplained fatigue.
Sometimes there are no symptoms. This happens at times with Type II diabetes. People can live for months or even years without knowing they have the disease. This kind of diabetes comes on so gradually that symptoms might not even be recognized.
Anyone can get diabetes. People who have close relatives with the disease are somewhat more likely to develop it. The risk of getting diabetes also increases as people grow older. People who are over 40 and overweight are more likely to get diabetes. So are people of African-American, Hispanic or Asian heritage. People who get diabetes when they are pregnant are more likely to get diabetes later in life.
There are certain things that everyone who has diabetes, whether Type I or Type II, needs to do to be healthy. They need to have eating plans. You need to pay attention to how much you exercise, because exercise can help your body use insulin better to convert glucose into energy for cells. Everyone with Type I diabetes, and some people with Type II diabetes, also need to take insulin injections. Some people with Type II diabetes take pills called "oral agents" which help their bodies make more insulin or use the insulin it is producing better. Some people with Type II diabetes can control their disease with weight loss, diet and exercise alone and don't need any medication.
Everyone who has diabetes should be seen at least once every six months by a diabetes specialist. You should also be seen periodically by other members of a diabetes treatment team, including a diabetes nurse educator, and a diabetes dietitian educator who helps you develop a meal plan that works best for you. Ideally , you should also see an exercise physiologist for help in developing an exercise plan, and if you think you need it, a social worker, psychologist or other mental health professional for help with the stresses and challenges of living with a chronic disease. Everyone who has diabetes should have regular eye exams at least once a year by an ophthalmologist to make sure that any eye problems that come with diabetes are caught early, and treated before they become worse.
Also, people with diabetes need to learn how to monitor their blood sugars day-to-day at home using home blood sugar monitoring. This daily testing will help you see how well your meal plan, exercise, and medication are working to keep your blood sugars in a normal range.
But happily, a recent nationwide study completed over a 10-year period showed that if people keep their blood sugars as close to normal as possible, they can reduce their risk of developing some of these complications by 50 percent or more.
A study being made at Joslin Diabetes Center and several other sites nationwide is screening the immediate relatives of someone with Type I diabetes because we can now identify those who will develop this form of the disease as much as five or more years in advance.
Type II diabetes is the most common type of diabetes, yet we still do not understand it very well. But recent research does suggest that there are some things you can do to prevent this form of diabetes, particularly if it runs in your family, or if you have had gestational diabetes, or if you are a member of an ethnic group that is more prone to this disease.