The body system is a delicate balance of different substances, each of which must be kept within certain levels regarded as normal, it may become dangerous for the body and life.
The level of sugar, or glucose, in the blood is a very good example. The generally accepted range of prebreakfast normal level (technically termed "fasting blood sugar") is between 70 and 110 milligrams per 100 millitres of blood, and when one's test result is far above this, one is diagnosed as having diabetes mellitus
Well, how does one's blood glucose come to be high? Glucose is the final breakdown product of digestion of carbohydrates (starchy foods like bread, rice, yam and cassava products) and, therefore, there's bound to be a lot of it in the body at any given time, where it is used as a source of energy. It's first stop after absorption from the intestine is the liver, where some of it is stored as glycogen as a reserve for future use, while the rest is passed on to the blood circulation and this is the place where the level must be kept down if the person is not to become diabetic.
To do this, in a normal case, is a chemical substance or hormone, called "insulin", produced by an organ, the pancreas .Insulin ensures that any excess glucose is passed on from the blood into the body cells, where some of it is again stored as glycogen and fat, but the greatest percentage is broken down to produce energy for the body. But this does not happen when, for some reasons, a person is lacking in insulin. What usually causes a person's body to start lacking insulin?
Insulin is a protein, and as the person's body grows older, a general degenerative process usually sets in, making it less capable of producing proteins generally, and this often includes insulin, with this insulin insufficiency will come because then the body may not get a chance to utilize most of the incoming glucose as energy.
All the above considered, it is no surprise therefore that diabetes is more commonly found in the more elderly and obese. But that is not to say that young people do not suffer from disease - only that their type is less common, and has a different causative factor. Rather than their pancreas being unable to produce an adequate amount of insulin any more due to geriatric degeneration, it is now believed that with them, the cells in question inherently lacked the capacity for adequate production in the first place, probably due to some inherited genetic factor.
In fact, the way young people find out they have the disease is usually different from their elderly obese counterparts. Whereas the illness may be diagnosed by chance among the elderly while they are being treated for complications of the disease such as blurring of vision, cataracts, tingling sensations in the limbs, or recurrent boils, the young sufferer is more likely to go down suddenly with the disease's classical symptoms :severe and unquenchable thirst, very frequently urinating and rapid loss of weight. Some may even have severe abdominal pains with vomiting, fooling even some doctors into thinking of something like appendicitis initially.
The treatment for the two types is also rather different. While in the elderly type the patient usually responds well to just a low carbohydrate diet, and a weight - trimming programme in cases of obesity, with some tablets which tend to stimulate the pancreas to produce more insulin, the younger types rarely respond to these tablets, and usually need regular insulin injections along with a low carbohydrate diet.
In either case, however, it is necessary for the patient to monitor his urine regularly to know how well he is responding to the treatment, and how much medicine he needs subsequently. This is possible because whenever somebody's blood glucose goes above the diabetic line, the sugar level is reflected in the urine whereas a non-diabetic's urine is usually sugar - free.
The level of sugar, or glucose, in the blood is a very good example. The generally accepted range of prebreakfast normal level (technically termed "fasting blood sugar") is between 70 and 110 milligrams per 100 millitres of blood, and when one's test result is far above this, one is diagnosed as having diabetes mellitus
Well, how does one's blood glucose come to be high? Glucose is the final breakdown product of digestion of carbohydrates (starchy foods like bread, rice, yam and cassava products) and, therefore, there's bound to be a lot of it in the body at any given time, where it is used as a source of energy. It's first stop after absorption from the intestine is the liver, where some of it is stored as glycogen as a reserve for future use, while the rest is passed on to the blood circulation and this is the place where the level must be kept down if the person is not to become diabetic.
To do this, in a normal case, is a chemical substance or hormone, called "insulin", produced by an organ, the pancreas .Insulin ensures that any excess glucose is passed on from the blood into the body cells, where some of it is again stored as glycogen and fat, but the greatest percentage is broken down to produce energy for the body. But this does not happen when, for some reasons, a person is lacking in insulin. What usually causes a person's body to start lacking insulin?
Insulin is a protein, and as the person's body grows older, a general degenerative process usually sets in, making it less capable of producing proteins generally, and this often includes insulin, with this insulin insufficiency will come because then the body may not get a chance to utilize most of the incoming glucose as energy.
All the above considered, it is no surprise therefore that diabetes is more commonly found in the more elderly and obese. But that is not to say that young people do not suffer from disease - only that their type is less common, and has a different causative factor. Rather than their pancreas being unable to produce an adequate amount of insulin any more due to geriatric degeneration, it is now believed that with them, the cells in question inherently lacked the capacity for adequate production in the first place, probably due to some inherited genetic factor.
In fact, the way young people find out they have the disease is usually different from their elderly obese counterparts. Whereas the illness may be diagnosed by chance among the elderly while they are being treated for complications of the disease such as blurring of vision, cataracts, tingling sensations in the limbs, or recurrent boils, the young sufferer is more likely to go down suddenly with the disease's classical symptoms :severe and unquenchable thirst, very frequently urinating and rapid loss of weight. Some may even have severe abdominal pains with vomiting, fooling even some doctors into thinking of something like appendicitis initially.
The treatment for the two types is also rather different. While in the elderly type the patient usually responds well to just a low carbohydrate diet, and a weight - trimming programme in cases of obesity, with some tablets which tend to stimulate the pancreas to produce more insulin, the younger types rarely respond to these tablets, and usually need regular insulin injections along with a low carbohydrate diet.
In either case, however, it is necessary for the patient to monitor his urine regularly to know how well he is responding to the treatment, and how much medicine he needs subsequently. This is possible because whenever somebody's blood glucose goes above the diabetic line, the sugar level is reflected in the urine whereas a non-diabetic's urine is usually sugar - free.
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