Diabetes is a chronic disease in which the body is unable to produce its own insulin to function normally. Most patients with this illness resort to injecting insulin into their bodies so as to maintain the required blood glucose levels that the body needs. At the moment there is no cure for diabetes mellitus but only available treatments that are helping people including children control this illness with special diet and exercise program. It is also a top leading cause of the high mortality rate and with so many deaths increasing in recent years, diabetics are now desperately seeking for a cure.
What Causes Diabetes?
It’s probably the most frequently asked question among many people especially if you are a diabetic person or you know of someone close to you who has just been given this dreaded diagnosis. A quick answer is that the cause is due to some factors that are either inherited from parents’ genes or brought about by some of the ills of environment. Our research and study show the following:
Type 1 Diabetes: This type of the illness is often known as an autoimmune disease which means that the person’s immune system simply fails and starts to destroy the cells of the pancreas that we know are responsible for producing insulin.
A person who suffers from it would have inherited this risk factor from both parents. Besides genetic reasons, it is also possible that the environment has helped to cause it as well like very cold weather and diet.
Type 2 Diabetes: This type of the illness causes cells to have insulin resistance and that the pancreas has problems making enough insulin. Similarly, genetics are helping the cause and the environment which includes your diet, total lack of regular exercise and obesity helped to trigger this disease.
Gestational Diabetes: Of all the types of diabetes medical researches have found no conclusive finding of the cause for this type. In most cases, symptoms for diabetes of this type do not appear but if they do, they usually occur during 24-28 weeks of pregnancy. Most studies have suggested that the risk factors include a family history of diabetes and being overweight and giving birth late. Once someone has been given this diagnosis, you should start taking actions to control it to avoid all sorts of complications. These could be both minor as well as disastrous ones and affecting the fetus like macrosomia, jaundice and respiratory problems causing much harm and distress to the unborn baby.
Medical experts like to think that during a woman’s pregnancy, her placenta hormones being released do not go well with those other secretions coming from her pancreas- insulin as we all know.
Ideally medicines should be avoided unless it is absolutely necessary and must be consulted with a doctor before taking them. The reason is because these medications can unknowingly damage the fetus and doctors might suggest other alternatives for you like a special gestational diet.
Primary Cause of Diabetes
Medical researches have shared with us many times that there are so many causes but if you were to ask just what is the main cause of this disease, what would it be? Well in our opinion that would be this. In a normal functioning body, the glucose or sugar enters the bloodstream so that the body can receive it much like food for the body. With a diabetic person, his pancreas do not function normally and stops producing beta cells which essentially are tiny insulin factories that do the job of transferring the glucose to the liver cells and muscles. This failure increases the blood sugar levels which then brings a host of all other medical problems too.
Other Causes:
1. Hereditary: Medical researches have concluded that the risks of getting the disease for the child is much greater from both parents instead of just one of them.This is the most common cause when a child tends to inherit the illness from both parents who suffer from this disease. But with only one parent, the risks come down slightly and medical statistics tell us the chance of the child being infected this way is about 10% for type 1 diabetes.
2.Age: As in many other diseases, age is always one of the risk factors and for this type, it usually takes place after the age group of 45 years old.
3. Weight: Many studies have shown that in many cases, about 80% of the diabetic patients are overweight.
4. Lack of Exercise: When there is absolute absence of exercise, this leads to the body’s inability to absorb the insulin being produced.
5. Food: The saying that ‘you are what you eat’ holds true here as well. Your eating habits can be telling signs and if you eat food that contains fats, sweets like most fast meals do this will inevitably contribute to excessive weight gain. Stating a weight loss program would then be a natural thing to do next because obesity has other medical complications too like heart disease. With too much fats saturation in your body cells, they become increasingly difficult to absorb insulin
Diabetes-Awareness|Learning Health-Care|Prevention
With the disease becoming such a big concern for people worldwide, it is being aware of its causes, the information, signs and symptoms and how to prevent it that is vital to remaining healthy and free of this illness. In short, “Prevention is always better than Cure” and since in this disease no cure has been found to stop this rampage, even more so. In short anyone who is made aware of this disease could do himself good by revisiting his lifestyle, start regular exercises, watch their diet so as not to develop high blood pressure and generally taking good care of their own body. Even if you suffer from this disease and start diabetes treatment you really don’t wish it to be insulin-dependent diabetes.
Bringing awareness to the big masses of people is always the first step in the fight of this disease before we can ask people to take steps to prevent the onset of this illness. Being able to detect the onset is also important because once you’ve confirmed you have it, you can immediately take the appropriate steps to control things like glucose in the blood or sometimes called differently as high blood sugar.
