The Health Blog

With so many people getting diabetes nowadays, will you be one of them? Does it matter whether you are rich or poor, thin or fat, old or young? Surely, you can’t catch diabetes from someone who has it - that is it’s not contagious! But how then does a person get diabetes? Does it come from eating too much sugar? And who is likely to get it?

Risks for the two main types of diabetes are quite different. Let’s take a look at the Type I first:

1. Genetic factors:

There are at least two particular genes that give a person the tendency toward developing type I diabetes. They belong to the so-called HLA system, which controls the body’s defenses against infection.

2. Diabetes as an Autoimmune Disease

Many scientists now believe that type I diabetes is the result of the body’s immune system attacking its own insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas.

There are two main types of diabetes mellitus (DM), Type I diabetes (also called insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, IDDM) and Type II diabetes (also called non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus).

Type I diabetes:
It occurs when the insulin-producing cells in the body do not function, and they make little or no insulin. If the body does not even produce insulin, the glucose cannot move into the cells. TO stay alive, the majority of these people will have to depend on insulin injections for the rest of their lives. Type I is much less common form of diabetes - only about 10-20 percent of all diabetics are insulin dependent. This kind of diabetes usually begins in childhood or youth.

Type II diabetes:
It most often begins in overweight adults who are over the age of 40. With Type II diabetes, the pancreas does still produce some insulin. In some cases, the body is simply not making enough insulin. In other cases, however, the body may be making an adequate amount of insulin, but that insulin is no longer effective because the cells’ insulin receptors are jammed. The pancreas may try to remedy the situation by producing more and more insulin. But if the receptors don’t work, even this may not help.