avoid diabetes

Diabetes is serious ailment which can impair your lifestyle severely impair your lifestyle if left unchecked. However, the best way to combat the disease is by understanding it. Here we look at diabetes in its different forms.

There are three main types of diabetes which can affect human beings. These include the type1, type 2 and gestational diabetes.

The type 1 diabetes is a disease of the autoimmune system. This condition usually occurs when the body’s infection fighting system turn on particular parts of the body. In diabetes, the immune system wages war against insulin producing beta cells produced by the pancreas and destroys them resulting in little or no insulin production. Without the insulin, it becomes near impossible for the body to absorb the glucose in the blood stream and convert it to much needed energy. People with this particular type of diabetes are required to take insulin doses each day to live.

The symptoms of this type of diabetes are usually noticeable within a short period of time even though the destruction of the beat calls can start much earlier. Symptoms include increased thirst and frequent urination with constant hunger, blurred vision, extreme fatigue and weight loss. If the disease is not diagnosed and treated in time, the patient can fall into a life threatening diabetic coma, commonly referred to as diabetic ketoacidosis.

The type 2 diabetes is more common with about 90-95% of diabetic people suffering from it. This type is associated with factors such as age, weight, sex, obesity, family history of diabetes, physical inactivity and also ethnicity. 80% of people living with diabetes are overweight or obese.

Type 2 diabetes does not involve the pancreas’s complete incapability to produce insulin. However, for a hitherto unknown reason the body is unable to use the insulin produced- a condition which has been named insulin resistance. Insulin production decreases several years later and results in the body’ complete inability to absorb glucose and turn it into energy.

Symptoms of this type of diabetes appear overtime and include nausea or fatigue, unusual thirst, blurred vision, slow healing of scars and wounds, frequent urination and infection and weight loss.

Gestational diabetes appears only during pregnancy and like the type 2 diabetes, occurs specifically in African Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians and women with a family history of diabetes. Woman suffering from this type of diabetes have an increased 20-30% risk of developing type 2 diabetes within a span of 5-10 years.