Juvenile Diabetes

There is a good deal of evidence to support such views. Juvenile diabetes usually make little or no insulin, and examinations of tissue from their pancreases show that beta cells have indeed been destroyed. Often antibodies against these cells can be found circulating in a juvenile diabetic's blood. Studies in animals have revealed that some viruses actually do make a beeline for the pancreas, where they attack and destroy beta cells, such animals develop a condition that is very similar to juvenile diabetes in humans.
Most researchers now believe that many caases of juvenile diabetes are probably caused by virus infections. It may take several years for viruses lurking in the body to do enough damage to the pancreas to produce actual symptoms of diabetes. The viruses are thus like a fire that smolders unnoticed in a pile of trash for a long time before it suddenly burst into flames. The diabetic condition may be the result of a series of virus infections, each of which does its own bit of damage to the beta cells until insulin production is no longer able to meet the body's needs.

Diabetes Old and New

Describing how diabetes may develop is not the same thing as explaining why it happens. Just as a diabetic condition may be the result of any one of several things, it is believed that diabetes has not one single cause, but, rather, may causes. Some of these are still unknown, but researchers have already discovered a number of clues and some of the newest findings have tuned many old ideas about the condition upside down.

If you read a book about diabetes that was written before about 1976 or so, you may find a statement like, Diabetes is not contagious. You can’t catch diabetes. That is still true in one respect: you don’t need to fear that you will come down with diabetes if you work or play with a diabetic, or if you live with a diabetic patent, child, or spouse. Yet a number of recent studies have suggested that at least one type of diabetes is in fact infectious. However, you can’t catch it in quite the same way you would catch a cold or flu or tuberculosis-it’s much more complicated than that.

Medical workers have noticed that diabetes in children, normally a rather rare disease through it is growing ever more common, tends to occur in clusters. The number of cases will suddenly crop up in a particular locality. Careful studies of health records have shown that outbreaks of juvenile diabetes often follow an epidemic of a virus disease, such as mumps or rubella. The group of viruses called Coxsackie viruses have also been implicated. In some cases, the diabetes epidemic follows the virus epidemic closely in others, there seems to be a period of about three or four years between the out break of the virus disease and the appearance of symptoms of diabetes.

How we get Diabetes:

In a healthy person, the pancreas works like a computer, sending out just enough of the right hormones to keep the blood glucose level within the narrow range of just enough. But in a diabetic, something has gone wrong with the finely tuned system. The blood sugar rises far above the normal limit- perhaps up to 200, 300, or even 400 mg% or more. That is the case for some diabetics. But as medical researchers have studied diabetes, they have discovered that damage to the beta cells and too little insulin are only part of the puzzle. Some people with very serious cases of diabetes have beta cells that look perfectly normal. Tests of their blood show that there is plenty of insulin there-more than enough, it would seem, to keep their sugar metabolism running smoothly. Yet they too suffer from hyperglycemia too much sugar in the blood.

Diabetes specialists now believe that a diabetic condition may arise in a number of ways. Damage to the beta cells, so that the pancreas cannot produce enough insulin, is one of them. High blood sugar could also result if the pancreas is producing normal amounts of insulin, but the body’s needs for the hormone become far higher than normal and the gland cannot keep up. This can often happen to people that over eat to an extreme degree, flooding their bodies with more carbohydrates than their system can handle. Or, if the thyroid gland goes out of order and becomes too active, it can increase the rate at which insulin is used up so that a relative insulin shortage results.

Who gets Diabetes?

Who gets diabetes? Different forms of the condition can affect people of all ages, from tiny babies up to the very old. It strikes both sexes, but women are more likely to be diabetic than men. Women who have had a lot of children and those who have had unusually large babies (weighing ten pounds or more at birth) seem to face a special risk. People who have relatives with diabetes especially the maturity onset type, have a greater than average chance of developing diabetes themselves.

Diabetes affects all the people of the earth, with one exception: diabetes is extremely rare amoung Eskimos. The Pima and Papago Indians of the sothwestern United States have the highest diabetes rate of all-72 percent. Scientists point to such statistics as evidence for a hereditary susceptibility to diabetes, but some studies make it clear that heredity is not the whole story. The yemenite jews, for example, had an extremely low diabetes rate before they emigrated to Israel, but after years of living in their new homeland, their diabetes rate rose above that of the Israelis who had originally come from Europe. The explanation for the change is apparently one of life-style, and especially of diet. Yemenites in Israel eat a much richer diet than they used to, and use a great deal of table sugar, which was not a part of their diet before.

In general, any diet even a vegetarian diet that results in a gain in weight will increase one’s chances of developing diabetes. A diet that causes weight reduction will decrease one’s chance of deveoping diabetes or, if it is already present, will make it less severe. At least three-quarters of the people who develop diabetes in middle age are overweight. Yet not all or even most overweight people develop diabetes.

Diabetes in Youth

Diabetes in Youth:

Usually all a person with latent diabetes needs to do is eat a sensible diet, get plenty of exercise, and have regular checkups to make sure the condition has no progressed. These are good health rules for anyone.

In some cases, a diabetic condition may be quite serious by the time it is correctly diagnosed. Juvenile diabetes, which strikes mainly children, teenagers, and youn adults, may develop quite suddenly. The person may feel fine, and then, with hardly any warning, he or she falls so seriously ill that emergency hospitilization may be necessary.

Juvenile diabetics account for only about 20 percent of the total diabetic population. The far more common forms of maturity-onset diabetes usually strike people after the age of thirty-five or forty- and then strike mainly people who are overweight. The probability of getting diabetes roughly doubles with each decade of life, and with each 20 percent of excess weight.

Maturity-onset diabetes usually develops gradually with plenty of warning signals. But a person may overlook some of the symptoms of think they are due to something else. Reaching for that extra bottle of Coke, one might think. It certainly is hot today! A person with a sudden need to urinate more than usual might pass it off with the thought, It must have have been that soup I had for dinner, or I shouldn’t hve had that extra glass of milk before bedtime. Even in children, the early signs and symptoms of diabetes may be misleading. If a child suddenly begins wetting the bed, his or her parents are more likely to wonder about emotional problems or spank the child for disobedience than to suspect diabetes. But taken together, the symptoms of diabetes spell out a very clear warning message. Since each of us has about one chance in five of developing diabetes at some time in life, it is a message we should all learn to read.

What is Diabetes?

The name diabetes comes from a greek word meaning a siphon. Ancient greek physicians observed one of the most striking symptoms of the disease: people with uncontrolled diabetes usually have a constant, urgent thirst. Though they drink huge quantities of liquids, the fluid seems to run right through them, as water runs through a siphon, for they also have a continual need to urinate. Indeed, it often seems that more fluid comes out than went in. This happens with diabetes.

Later, a second part, mellitus, was added to the name of the disease. Mellitus, was added to the name of the disease. Mellitus comes from a latin word meaning “honey”, and this description was added because some physicians noticed that flies were attracted to honey. When other physicians tried tasting the urine, they discovered that it was sweet. Most people today just talk about “diabetes”, but physicians prefer to use its more precise, full name diabetes mellitus. In this way they avoid confusion with another, very much rarer disease called diabetes insipidus, in which great quanities of urine are also produced, but in which the urine does ot contain sugar.

Many people first discover they have diabetes when a routine medical checkup shows sugar in the blood or urine. They may hav such mild cases that no symptoms have shown up at all; all they have is that telltale trace of sugar. Perhaps their sugar tests are positive only at times of great stress, such as during an infection or during pregnancy, and afterward everything seems to go back to normal. Such cases are examples of latent diabetes.