What exactly is it, and why should you worry about it?
Diabetes mellitus, or just diabetes, is a disease in which the affected person has higher than normal blood sugar levels. This can be a consequence of the body's failure to produce enough of the insulin hormone, or the resistance of the body cells to the insulin. It is important to say that diabetes is NOT contagious. There is no chance you can catch diabetes from someone.
So what is the explanation?
Whenever you eat something, practically anything, it causes the sugar levels in your blood to rise. This is because sugar is a carbohydrate that is present in most foods, and is a vital source of energy for our bodies. So when our sugar levels rise, that is good, because it means that now more energy is present in our bloodstream for our body to use. Then an organ called pancreas releases insulin that lowers blood sugar. Insulin is a hormone that regulates carbohydrates and fat in the body. When insulin is present in the body it causes your body cells to take up glucose (or sugar) from blood and store it for energy uses later. So it's easy to see that insulin effectively reduces sugar levels in blood.
So basically having high sugar level in blood sounds good because it means your body has energy...however it's not entirely true. The problem is that having a high blood sugar only means that there is a lot of potential energy in our bloodstream, not that it's available for use by the body. It gets available for the body only AFTER insulin helps process the sugar into cells, and that lowers it to normal sugar levels.
Now imagine that for some reason there is no insulin in our body. What happens then?
You eat something and your blood sugar rises, but insulin is not present so blood sugar remains high and full of unused energy. Then after some time you eat again...your blood sugar rises again, and again remains unused. And again, and again and again...and now the sugar in your blood is so abundant that it starts to cause damage to your body, including eye, kidney, nerve damage as well as heart disease, and on top of all that your body is left without energy and makes you feel tired all the time.
That state of high blood sugar is called "Hyperglycemia".
So diabetes is a disease in which your body fails to produce insulin (Type 1 diabetes - link to article) or is resistant to insulin (Type 2 diabetes - link to article). Diabetes is treatable since 1921, the year when insulin became available. Therefore type 1 is treated with insulin injections to your body, while type 2 can be controlled with medication. However, although diabetes is treatable, at this time it is still not curable. It is a chronic condition, and without proper treatments it can cause many complications of which some I already mentioned.
If you would like to know more about it you can visit the links I already gave for more in depth explanation of the diabetes types, or you can visit our site to learn more about what are normal blood sugar levels and also please have a look on this article as well.
