FAQ
What is diabetes ?
Diabetes is a disease causing abnormally high blood glucose levels. Most foods we eat are turned into glucose for producing energy. Pancreas, an organ lying near the stomach, produces a hormone called insulin to help our bodies absorb glucose. When you have diabetes, your body can neither make enough insulin nor use its own insulin.
So when people with diabetes intake glucose through eating food such as bread, cereal, fruit and starchy vegetables, legumes, milk, yoghurt and sweets, the glucose cannot be converted into energy. Instead, it is left in the blood. This is why they have higher blood glucose levels.
Diabetes can cause serious health complications. Choosing healthy foods and doing physical exercises will help manage blood glucose levels and body weight. However, people with type 1 diabetes require further consideration to control their blood glucose levels.
Will you develop diabetes complications no matter what you do?
No.
Having consistently high blood glucose levels is the most common cause for diabetes complications. Controlling your diabetes can greatly cut down your chance for developing eye, kidney, circulation and other diabetes related problems. A lowering of HbA1c (a blood test that measures the average blood glucose over the past 3 months) by 1 point can reduce long-term complications by 21%. That is why good diabetes management and glucose level control is so important.
What are the symptoms of diabetes ?
People who think they might have diabetes must visit a physician for diagnosis. They might have SOME or NONE of the following symptoms:
- Frequent urination
- Excessive thirst
- Unexplained weight loss
- Extreme hunger
- Sudden vision changes
- Tingling or numbness in hands or feet
- Feeling very tired much of the time
- Very dry skin
- Sores that are slow to heal
- More infections than usual.
Nausea, vomiting, or stomach pains may accompany some of these symptoms in the abrupt onset of type 1 diabetes.
What are the risk factors for diabetes?
Risk factors for type 2 diabetes include older age, obesity, family history of diabetes, prior history of gestational diabetes, impaired glucose tolerance, physical inactivity, and race/ethnicity.
Risk factors are less well defined for type 1 diabetes than for type 2 diabetes, but autoimmune, genetic, and environmental factors are involved in developing this type of diabetes.
Gestational diabetes occurs more frequently in people with a family history of diabetes than in other groups. Obesity is also associated with higher risk. Women who have had gestational diabetes are at increased risk for later developing type 2 diabetes. In some studies, nearly 40% of women with a history of gestational diabetes developed diabetes in the future.
Other specific types of diabetes, which may account for 1% to 2% of all diagnosed cases, result from specific genetic syndromes, surgery, drugs, malnutrition, infections, and other illnesses.
Is there a cure for diabetes ?
Not currently.
But won’t bitter melon and pumpkins cure diabetes ?
No. It is true that bitter melon and pumpkins are healthy vegetables, but eating them does not cure diabetes.
There are many health food commercials promising a cure for diabetes. Unfortunately diabetes is a complex disease that currently has no cure. Some foods such as vegetables that are high in fibre and low in glycaemic index may help lower blood glucose when eaten regularly. But lowering blood glucose is not same as curing diabetes. When you stop taking the specific food, more than likely, the higher blood glucose will return.
Isn’t there any diabetes research ?
Yes, there are research projects to cure both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Several approaches to cure diabetes are being pursued:
- Pancreas transplantation from organ donors or other sources.
- Islet cell transplantation (islet cells produce insulin). This involves triggering the body to grow its own new insulin producing cells, either by copying existing ones - some are usually still active, even in people who have had diabetes for decades - or causing the pancreas to create new ones.
- Metabolic control (Artificial pancreas development). Treatments that continually monitor the body's blood sugar levels and automatically respond with the correct dose of insulin would significantly enhance metabolic control. Research is focused on demonstrating that advanced monitoring tools improves the health of people with diabetes, and on developing technologies that link insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. Such a "closed loop" system would, in effect, be an artificial pancreas.
- Genetic manipulation, where fat or muscle cells that don’t normally make insulin are inserted with a human insulin gene, and then these "pseudo" islet cells are transplanted into people with type 1 diabetes.
These approaches still have a lot of challenges, such as preventing immune rejection, finding an adequate number of insulin cells, keeping cells alive, and others. But progress is being made.
How are children especially affected by diabetes ?
Type 1 diabetes, which used to be called juvenile diabetes, is usually first diagnosed in children, teens, or young adults. In type 1 diabetes, the body's immune system attacks and destroys beta cells in the pancreas, so that they no longer make insulin. People with type 1 diabetes must take insulin every day. Approximately one of every 400 to 500 children and adolescents has type 1 diabetes.
Among youth, obesity, physical inactivity, and prenatal exposure to diabetes in the mother have become widespread, and may contribute to the increased development of type 2 diabetes during childhood and adolescence.