Understanding What Diabetes Is All About

If you've been recently diagnosed with this illness, or if you've have this condition for a while, understanding what diabetes is will help you become a more informed patient. Since this is an incurable medical condition, it's important to receive proper treatment to minimize or eliminate the possibility of short-term or long-range complications. By increasing your knowledge of what diabetes is, you will be in a better position to live a longer and healthier life.

What Is Diabetes?

A simple definition of what diabetes is describes this disease as a chronic inability of the body to use sugar. Although many professionals in the medical field question the possible causes of diabetes, there has not been set forth a definitive reason why some people develop this illness. However, all agree that diabetes is what makes the specialized cells in the body to decrease or completely stop producing insulin. With the body unable to properly manage glucose levels, a wide range of complications may result. Since diabetes affects many vital organs in the body, it's important to get medical help to manage this disease.

What Are the Symptoms?

Recognizing the symptoms of diabetes and seeking early medical help will minimize or stop certain complications of this disease. Common symptoms include excessive thirst with accompanying increased urination, weight loss and lack of energy. However, these signs may also be present in other illnesses, which is why a complete checkup with blood and urine analysis is in order. Although diabetes may manifest these symptoms, there are occasions where the disease is silent. If you have a family history of diabetes, it's recommended that you have regular physical exams to determine if the disease is present or even if you are in a pre-diabetic stage. Conservative estimates say that for every person who has received a diagnosis of diabetes, there is another person who has this disease but is unaware of it.

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Selected Diabetes Articles

What You Need To Know About Borderline Diabetes

Oh, we've come so far in diabetes research and treatments over the years. Just about ten or twenty years ago, you could be diagnosed as being "borderline diabetes" or "pre-diabetes". This gave a false level of reassurance. Treatment for diabetes usually wasn't started, as it wasn't thought of as being necessary, since you were still in a grace period. Then, the patient usually got worse. [Read full article]
 

Diabetes Care: An Ongoing Process That Requires Being Extra Vigilant

It is sad but true that diabetes is a major health concern in the West which can be seen when we find that there are an estimated three to five percent Westerners affected by this silent killer of a disease, and an estimated one million Canadians are also so affected. Diabetes generally causes an individual’s body cells to become unable to absorb as well as use glucose in an adequate manner and for various reasons including becoming resistant to the hormone known as insulin or because of lack of insulin. And, without proper diabetes care, the patient’s body cells may become starved of fuel that is needed to provide energy to the body and sugar will not then be able to get into the cells, thus causing elevated levels of it in the blood. [Read full article]
 

Understanding First Signs of Diabetes

In recent decades, diabetes has become one of the leading causes of mortality in the United States. In most of the times, it is really difficult to recognize the first signs of diabetes, especially in the case of diabetes type 2, as either there are no symptoms at all or the symptoms draw a parallel to other insignificant health conditions. In fact, when you become able to notice the signs of diabetes for the first time, it reflects the advanced symptoms one way or another. [Read full article]