• Question: What do you know about diabetes?

    Asked by anon-185900 to Verity, Trystan, Raquel, Danny, Catherine, Andy on 10 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Raquel Medialdea Carrera

      Raquel Medialdea Carrera answered on 10 Nov 2018:

      Diabetes is such an interesting disease!
      It affects the way the human body uses glucose. The glucose is a sugar that is the main source of energy for the body. Without glucose, the body cannot work.
      Insulin is a hormone that allows the glucose to get into the cells and provide the energy to the body.
      When someone has diabetes, they have problems producing insulin or the insulin they produce is not appropriate. Then, as the glucose cannot get into the cells, the blood glucose (sugar) levels get very high and that makes people be very sick if they don’t get treatment. 😷

    • Photo: Danny Ward

      Danny Ward answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      I learnt about diabetes during my undergraduate biology degree at university!
      .
      There are actually two types of the main diabetes we know. This disease is called diabetes mellitus. Type I (non-sugar related which you get when you are born/young) and type II (sugar-related which you can get at any point but often emerges later in life). An organ called the pancreas inside of us produces insulin to deal with sugar we eat in a healthy person. Type I patients don’t produce any or enough insulin so they can’t deal with the sugar in their body safely. Type 2 is all about resistance to sugar – over time peoples bodies can stop responding to sugar and so produce less insulin or any insulin they have is broken down by their bodies. This leads to high blood sugar. It can give people nasty symptoms or put them at risk from other diseases but thankfully we are pretty good at dealing with the disease in this day and age. A prescribed insulin dose after a meal will help control blood sugar and can help manage symptoms/risk.
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      Some researchers have suggested that there may be 3 other types of this type of disease that we are starting to learn about too but we’re still researching that….it gets quite complex, huh!
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      There is another disease called diabetes insipidus but this is a completely different unrelated issue even though it sound similar in name to diabetes mellitus, its very different! This disease is caused by hormone issues with vasopressin (AVP) also called antidiuretic hormone (ADH).

    • Photo: Verity Hill

      Verity Hill answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      Not much! Both Danny and Raquel have answered this with most of the info I know!
      One thing that’s interesting is that type I diabetes is an “auto-immune” disease, where your body’s defence system (immune system) attacks you! It destroys cells in the pancreas, an organ just above your liver, which deals with insulin. We don’t really understand why the immune system does this, but it’s actually responsible for lots of diseases, like Multiple Sclerosis, Lupus, Crohn’s disease, asthma and many more. If we can crack what makes your immune system turn on you, then we can help a lot of people!

    • Photo: Trystan Leng

      Trystan Leng answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      I don’t know much about diabetes! Its not my research area, and I didn’t do Biology past GCSE level. A close friend of mine does have type 1 diabetes though, so I know a bit about the impact it has on people, and how people cope with the condition. By regularly injecting insulin, and monitoring their diet more closely than the average person, those with type 1 diabetes can manage their condition really well.

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