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What is diabetes?
Diabetes is one of the oldest known human diseases. Its fullname,‘diabetes mellitus’,comes from the Greek words for ‘siphon’ and ‘sugar’ and describes the most obvious symptom of uncontrolled diabetes: the passing of large amounts of urine, which is sweet because it contains sugar. A proper understanding of the condition has only developed over the last hundred years or so. In 1921, two Canadian scientists, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, discovered that a mysterious substance was produced in small groups of cells, known as the islets of Langerhans, within the pancreas. They named this substance ‘insulin’ (after the Latin name for ‘islet’ which is insula), and it was probably the most important discovery in the history of diabetes. When insulin became available as a treatment for diabetes after 1922, it was seen as a medical miracle, transforming the lives of many young people who would otherwise have died after a painful ‘wasting’ illness.The cause of diabetes is a deficiency of the hormone ‘insulin’. A hormone is a chemical messenger that is made in one part of the body (in this case the pancreas; and has an effect on more distant parts when it is released into the bloodstream. In type 1 diabetes there may be complete failure of insulin production. In type 2 diabetes, however, there is usually a combination of a partial failure of insulin production and a reduced body response to the hormone. This is known as insulin resistance. This chapter will discuss what diabetes is and what goes wrong with normal blood sugar regulation, the different types of diabetes, what causes it, what the main symptoms are, who gets it and how it is diagnosed. |
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This intel was contributed by luis188
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May, 2012
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