Diabetes - the blood glucose levels disease
Diabetes is a disease in which blood glucose levels are above normal.
Most of the food comming into our body is turned into glucose (sugar). An organ that lies near the stomach, the pancreas, produces a hormone called insulin to help glucose get into the cells of our bodies. Then our internal mechanisms burn it to create energy.
When you have diabetes, your body either doesn’t make enough insulin or can’t use its own insulin as well as it should. This causes large amounts of sugar to build up in your blood.
| The name, diabetes, is usually attributed to the Greek physician Aretaeus, who lived in 200 BC. He used for the first time the term diabetes for a disease in which the water drinked by a person runs rapidly through his/her body.
The name diabetes means a medical condition in which the patient drinks too much water and urinates frequently. Due of insuline problem, the urine is sweet because it contains glucose. Frequently urinating is a kind of body selfprotection, as the excess of glucose is eliminated by this way. Approximately 9,0 million, or one out of every ten men over the age of 20 in the United States has diabetes. However, almost one-third of them do not know it. |
The most dangerous consequences of diabetes are
- heart disease,
- stroke,
- kidney disease,
- blindness,
- impotence and
- amputations.
Diabetic people strike more than twice as often as the others do.
The bad news is disbetes has no cure yet.
In 2002 year, the total annual economic cost of diabetes in the United States was estimated to be $132 billion. That means one out of every 10 dollars spent for health care pourposes.
It is the fifth-deadliest disease in the United States and it is in top ten all over the world.