Diabetes affects all age groups:
- Type I or insulin-dependent is more common in children and young people;
- Type II patients include mature individuals over 40 years of age.
Insulin is a pancreatic hormone responsible for maintaining normal blood glucose levels. When this hormone is synthesized in low amounts, your blood sugar rises.
How Does Diabetes Appear?
Diabetes may occur for several reasons:
- Pancreatic disorders that lead to decreased insulin synthesis (chronic pancreatitis is more often encountered in alcoholics);
- Other endocrine diseases;
- Administration of sterile hormones;
- Other medicines that cause hyperglycemia.
There is also a genetic predisposition to diabetes, as demonstrated by a large number of cases in certain families. Stress-related diabetes is a reality, stressful condition referring to certain special situations: severe burns, acute myocardial infarction, and other life-threatening diseases during which an increased amount of hormones that increase blood glucose is discharged.
Clinical manifestations
As clinical manifestations, diabetes can be acutely triggered directly by diabetic coma or, more commonly, by symptoms related to hyperglycemia: the patient eats, drinks and urinates more than usual.
The diagnosis is based on testing the glucose early in the morning. Often, it is a random breakthrough in a routine medical checkup, and that person may not yet have any manifestation of the disorder. But diabetes will progress in the absence of proper treatment.
Over time, diabetes produces lesions in the cardiovascular system: severe ischemic cardiopathy, leading to myocardial infarction characterized usually by no pain, arteriosclerosis responsible for circulatory problems in the legs, pain and slow walking, and sexual impotence in men.
The eye is another important organ affected severely in diabetes. If not treated, diabetes could lead to blindness.
Diabetes also develops a serious condition that irreversibly leads to kidney failure treatable only by renal dialysis or a kidney transplant.
The diabetic patient has an increased susceptibility to infections, with more aggressive germs and heavier response to treatment. Scars resulting from accidents heal harder.
An acute complication of diabetes is a diabetic hyperglycemic coma that occurs when the blood glucose level is very high. It should be said that there is also a hypoglycemic coma when you are receiving insulin and the dose is too high.
