By Jonathan Baird, MPAS, PA-C, ATC, RMUoHP Faculty for Master of Physician Assistant Studies
The origins of diabetes go back to the first-century BC when the ancient Greek physician, Aretaeus of Cappadocia, recognized a condition where people had excessive urination and called it diabetes, which means siphon. It was also discovered the urine was sweet, creating the understanding that the disease involved blood sugar.
Over time we have learned diabetes centers around the pancreas, which effects the blood sugar. It’s a disease that can’t really be cured, but it can be managed. And since the early days of discovery of the disease, we’ve learned to manage it very well. It wasn’t that long ago that diabetes could almost be considered a terminal disease among those with type 1 diabetes.
In fairly simple terms, diabetes is a disease caused by high blood sugar or glucose, which mainly comes from your food. Your pancreas creates the hormone insulin, which helps the body use glucose in the blood in the form of energy. When your body does not produce insulin, glucose levels in the blood get too high, which can become fatal if not managed properly.
When I’m speaking with my physician assistant students here at Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions, we discuss the symptoms of diabetes – the three P’s; polyuria, polydipsia, and polyphagia. The three P’s refer to the formal terms for the three key diabetic symptoms and include excessive hunger and increased appetite, frequent or excessive urine production and urination, and an abnormal increased thirst that often can’t be satisfied. These symptoms can be accompanied by fatigue.
For the most part, the symptoms of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes are the same. But with type 1 it is a destructive process where the cells within your pancreas are not making insulin. Think of insulin as a little key that floats around in your bloodstream and goes around and unlocks cells, allowing glucose in for energy. With type 1 diabetes, you’re not making enough of those keys which increases the level of glucose in the blood to nearly toxic levels.
With type 2 diabetes, your pancreas works overtime making tons of insulin, but we have become insensitive to it. It is as though someone went around and put more locks on the doors and even though there is a bunch of keys floating around in the bloodstream, there aren’t enough relative to the amount of locks we’re insensitive too. Because of that, there’s a backlog of blood glucose and the net result is the same as with type 1 diabetes.
Whether it’s type 1 or type 2 diabetes, we get to a point where we consider sugar or glucose in the bloodstream like poison, and it’s going to attack. It attacks tiny blood vessels – like those in the eyes, the kidneys and nerve endings of your hands and feet. People can end up with diabetic induced blindness – diabetes being one of the most common causes of acquired blindness in the U.S. The same is true for kidney disease which can lead to dialysis, and neuropathy, which can cause amputations.
Diabetes can be managed, and diabetics can expect to live long healthy lives as long as they faithfully manage their diabetes through medication, diet, and lifestyle.
More about the issues of insulin, the cost and types can be learned by listening to the RMUpload podcast, The PA & the Patient: Diabetes and You.
