Speaker: What is diabetes?

Diabetes or more formerly, diabetes mellitus is a disease in which the body does not properly produce a hormone called insulin or when the body does not properly respond to the insulin that is produced. When you sit down for your evening meal, you are delivering to your body the fuel required for your very survival, glucose or blood sugar. After eating, nutrients are absorbed from your small intestine into the blood stream. Ultimately, these nutrients are converted to glucose. As your blood glucose rises, cells within the pancreas known as beta cells produce and secrete insulin. The insulin then signals your tissues to process glucose as a source of energy. If glucose levels are either too high or too low your health will suffer.

Speaker: When insulin is either not produced or when your body is resistant to it then the sugar stays in your blood and your levels become high.

Speaker: Type 1 diabetes occurs when your pancreas fails to produce insulin altogether. This form of diabetes usually occurs during childhood or adolescence accounting for only 10% of diabetes cases. If you have type 1 diabetes you will always require insulin replacement. Without proper treatment it is a fatal illness.

Speaker: They actually don't make insulin and that’s why we know when their disease onsets because they typically present quite unwell to their physician often to an emergency department.

Speaker: Type 2 diabetes is far more common. Accounting for 90% of all cases, type 2 occurs when the body does not properly respond to insulin. You are more likely to be diagnosed with type 2 if you are overweight or if your family members are suffering from diabetes. Although common in adults, more and more children struggling with obesity are recognized to have this form of diabetes.

Speaker: With type 2 diabetes your body still makes insulin, but it becomes resistant to the insulin that it makes and that’s why again, we don't necessarily know when the onset is because for some degree of time your body can increase its insulin production to try and get the blood sugars under control.

Speaker: A third type of diabetes, gestational diabetes occurs only during pregnancy, often ending after child birth. With that said, women would with gestational diabetes are at an increased risk for developing type 2 diabetes later in life. Approximately 3 to 4% of pregnant women will be diagnosed with gestational diabetes.

Speaker: When the blood sugar runs high for all swings in the high in the ranges for long periods of time this is very hard on the body, it’s hard on the blood vessels and on the smaller blood vessels and this leads to many complications.

Dr. Duggan: It’s very important that once we diagnose the diabetes that we give therapy to try and bring the blood sugars down. Now for a type 1 patient that would be insulin, for a type 2 we can start sometimes with even diet control and then progress to pills which can help with blood sugar control and then sometimes they actually need insulin as well to control their blood sugars.

Speaker: What we do know is if the blood sugar control is good and there is type control of blood sugar within the normal range; the rate of these complications can be dramatically lowered. So somebody with diabetes can make a big difference to their own condition depending on how they manage their own control of their diabetes.