diabetes

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Disease that can be caused by reduced production of the hormone insulin, or a reduced response of the liver, muscle, and fat cells to insulin. This affects the body's ability to use and regulate sugars effectively. Diabetes mellitus is a disorder of the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas that prevents the production of insulin. Treatment is by strict dietary control and oral or injected insulin, depending on the type of diabetes.

Insulin increases glucose uptake from the blood into most body cells, except the brain and liver. In the liver, its effect is to reduce the production of glucose. Insulin works with other hormones to keep the concentration of glucose in the blood stable. A person with diabetes does not have this close regulation and may find that his or her glucose levels rise dangerously after a meal. Normally urine does not contain glucose, but when the blood glucose levels rise in a diabetic person, it appears in the urine. A person with diabetes may also be likely to have glucose levels that are too low at times.

There are two forms of diabetes: type 1, or insulin-dependent diabetes, which usually begins in childhood (early onset) and is an autoimmune condition; and type 2, or non-insulin-dependent diabetes, which occurs in later life (late onset). Without treatment, the patient may go blind, suffer from ulcers, lapse into diabetic coma, and die. Early-onset diabetes tends to be more severe than that developing in later years. There is also a strong link between late-onset diabetes and being seriously overweight (obese) – over 80% of sufferers are obese. Although the precise nature of the link between diabetes and obesity is not known, studies showed that in mice a hormone secreted by fat cells blocked the action of insulin.

Before the discovery of insulin by Frederick Banting and Charles Best, severe diabetics did not survive.

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