What about Blood Sugar

What happens to the body when the blood sugar level rises? One thing, the kidneys are affected. All the blood in the body is continually filtered through these two large, bean-shaped organs. The kidneys get rid of many of the body’s waste products and poisons, along with enough water to flush them out of the body. Blood cells and large molecules such as proteins are held back by the kidneys’ filters. As the forming urine trickles through the kidneys, there is a continual trading of chemicals back and forth. If there is too much of something in the blood a paticular salt, for example the excess passes into the urine. If there is just enough of a substance, or even a shortageof it, the kidneys will hold it back, and it will pass back into the blood. In a healthy person, there is just the right amount of glucose in the blood, so the kidneys hold it all back. Normally there is no sugar in the urine. But when the blood sugar level rises beyond about 180 mg%, the excess sugar begins to spill over into the urine. Remember that the highest the blood sugar normally goes is about 160 mg%. The presence of glucose in the urine is call glucosuria.

The kidnyes are used to producing urine of a paticular concentration. This may vary somewhat during the day. You’ve probably noticed that your urine looks and smells much stronger first thing in the morning, when it has been accumulating all night, than it does later in the day. But there must always be enough water in the urine to keep irritating and poisonous nitrogen wastes well diluted. As the amount of glucose spilling into a diabetic’s urine increases, the urine becomes more concentrated. So the kidneys must put out more water to keep the urine diluted enough. When they do this, the body becomes dehydrated, and the person becomes thirsty. You can read more about this and much more information about diabetes at my blog.

Myths About Misconceptions Diabetes

Of all the major chronic diseases that affect Americans, diabetes, which many people erroneously call “sugar diabetes” seems to be the one most surrounded by myth and misinformation. Following are some of the mistakes that people make abut it, followed by the actual facts about the disease.
.Diabetes is contagious. No, it isn’t. You probably inherited a genetic tendency to become diabetic, and may pass it on to you children, but you didn’t catch it, or can you give it to others.
.You get diabetes from eating too much sugar. No, you don’t sugar itself does not cause the disease, although it certainly has an effect on blood glucose levels.
.The medications you doctor gives you will cure the diabetes. No, they won’t. Research scientist are hard at work on a cure, but one has not yet been found. Blood glucose levels can be controlled and brought to near-normal levels with diet, exercise, and medications, but the disease itself is not cured.
.The disease will go away by itself eventually. No, it won’t. Even if you have no symptoms and with Type 2 diabetes , you may not have had even when you were diagnosed, you still have diabetes, and you still need to work at controlling it and even when your symptoms disappear become your diabetes is well-controlled, you still have the disease.

Diabetes Treatment

All diabetes treatment is aimed at one thing: controlling the level of glucose in the bloodstream. There are a variety of ways to do this, all of which depend on a number of factors: type of diabetes, age at onset, severity of symptoms and glucose level, presence of complicating factors, general health and current lifestyle, and changes the diabetic is willing to make.

The three major categories of treatment are diet, exercise, and medication. In Type 2 diabetes, diet and exercise alone are often all that is necessary to bring blood glucose down to manageable levels. Sometimes oral medication is necessary. Type 1 diabetes is treated with insulin in addition to diet and exercise.
Oral hypoglycemic agents help the body metabolize the glucose obtained from food. These drugs are not insulin, but they do stimulate insulin-producing cells to secrete more insulin, and they help overcome insulin resistance.

Insulin injections, which you learn to give to yourself with a variety of implements, may be combined with an oral hypoglycemic agent, but usually a diabetic who needs insulin takes only insulin. This hormone used to be manufactured from pork and beef, but now most of it is genetically engineered and synthesized, thus more effective in treating human diabetes. Controlling blood cholesterol and blood pressure also are important components of treatment as well.

Is Juvenile Diabetes Hereditary

There is the question whether Juvenile diabetes is passed down or not. Recent studies have shown that most juvenile diabetics have several specific types of chemicals on the surface of their cells that are not usually found in other people. These cell-surface chemicals, which are hereditary, might be the key to the increased vulnerability of the pancreas. They might be the chemicals against which a person’s body makes antibodies when viruses attack. Sometimes they might serve as chemical hooks by which invading viruses can attach themselves to the beta cells. Interestingly, maturity-onset diabetics do not show the same sort of correlation with special cell-suface chemicals that juvenile diabetics do.

Before the role of viruses in juvenile diabetes was suspected, it was thought that this was a hereditary disease that two had genes, one carried by each parent, could combine in the child to produce the disease, Thus two seemingly normal, nondiabetic parents could have diabetic children. If one of the parents was a diabetic, the chances of a child’s inheriting the disease would be even greater. But genetic studies have indicated that things don’t work that way after all. Studies of identical twins share exactly the same heredity. So if juvenile diabetes is inherited, you would expect that if one twin has juvenile diabetes, the other will have it too. Researchers were surprised to find that this was not the case. Joslin Foundation in Boston surveyed groups of juvenile diabetics who had identical twins and found that only about half the other twins also had the disease. Even to persent, of course, is much higher than the probability of two unrelated persons having diabetes.

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.