How does diabetes work

When enough beta cells are gone, your pancreas stops making insulin or makes so little insulin that you need to take insulin to live.

Type 1 diabetes develops most often in young people but can also appear in adults. If you have type 2 diabetes, your body does not use insulin properly. This is called insulin resistance. At first, the beta cells make extra insulin to make up for it. But, over time your pancreas can't make enough insulin to keep your blood sugar at normal levels.

Type 2 diabetes develops most often in middle-aged and older adults but can appear in young people. Some people can manage type 2 diabetes with healthy eating and exercise. Diabetes is a progressive disease. Even if you don't need to treat your diabetes with medications at first, you may need to over time. Gestational diabetes is diabetes that develops during pregnancy. For most women, blood sugar levels will return to normal after giving birth.

Today, more than 34 million Americans have been diagnosed with diabetes. Worldwide, more than million people have diabetes. Diabetes is a serious condition that causes higher than normal blood sugar levels.

Diabetes occurs when your body cannot make or effectively use its own insulin, a hormone made by special cells in the pancreas called islets eye-lets.

Then, your body uses that glucose for energy. But with diabetes, several major things can go wrong to cause diabetes. Type 1 and type 2 diabetes are the most common forms of the disease, but there are also other kinds, such as gestational diabetes, which occurs during pregnancy, as well as other forms. Type 1 diabetes, previously known as juvenile diabetes, is the most severe form of the disease. Type 1 diabetes has also been called juvenile diabetes becuse it usually develops in children and teenagers.

But people of all ages can develop type 1 diabetes. The islet cells sense glucose in the blood and produce the right amount of insulin to normalize blood sugars. This attack on the body's own cells is known as autoimmune disease. Scientists are not sure why the autoimmune attack happens.

But once the insulin-producing cells are destroyed, a person can no longer produce their own insulin. And, if left untreated, high blood sugar levels can damage eyes, kidneys, nerves, and the heart, and can also lead to coma and death. So type 1 diabetes must be treated through a daily regimen of insulin therapy. The onset of type 1 diabetes happens very quickly. The following symptoms may appear suddenly and are too severe to overlook:. Type 1 diabetes is treated by taking insulin injections or using an insulin pump or other device.

The amount is based on many factors, including:. These factors change a lot throughout every day. So, deciding on what dose of insulin to take is a complicated balancing act. If you take too much insulin, then your blood sugar can drop to a dangerously low level.

This is a called hypo glycemia and it can be life-threatening. If you take too little insulin, your blood sugar can rise to a dangerously high level. Your cells are not getting the sugar, or energy, they need. This is called hyper glycemia. Your baby is more likely to have obesity as a child or teen, and more likely to develop type 2 diabetes later in life too. In the United States, 88 million adults—more than 1 in 3—have prediabetes.

With prediabetes, blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not high enough yet to be diagnosed as type 2 diabetes. Prediabetes raises your risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. The good news is if you have prediabetes, a CDC-recognized lifestyle change program can help you take healthy steps to reverse it.

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What is Diabetes? Minus Related Pages. Diabetes by the Numbers. Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States.