Dealing with Diabetes
Find out more about the symptoms, treatment, and management of diabetes

Diabetes is a disease in which the body produces abnormally high levels of blood glucose sugar. Simply put, people with diabetes have problems processing food to energy. After eating a meal, food is broken down into a sugar called glucose, which is carried by the blood to cells throughout the body. Cells use insulin, a hormone made in the pancreas, to help them convert blood glucose into energy.
Diabetes develops as a result of deficient levels of insulin or because the cells in the fat, muscles, and liver do not use insulin efficiently, or both. As a result, the amount of glucose in the blood increases while the cells are starved of energy.
This leads eventually to damage in the nerves and blood vessels, which can lead to complications such as kidney disease, blindness, nerve problems, gum infections, and amputation, heart disease and stroke,
Types of Diabetes
The three main types of diabetes are type 1, type 2, and gestational diabetes.
• Type 1 diabetes is usually diagnosed in children, young adults, and teenagers. In this form of diabetes, the cells in the pancreas have lost the ability to make insulin because of attacks from the body’s immune system.
• Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes and can be developed at any age. Muscle, liver, and fat cells do not use insulin properly, making the body produce excess amounts of insulin.
• Gestational diabetes develops in some women during the late stages of pregnancy. Although this form of diabetes usually goes away after the baby is born, a woman who has increases her risk of getting type 2 diabetes later.
Pre-diabetes
The body may be in a pre-diabetic state in which blood glucose levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be characterized officially as diabetes. However, people who develop pre-diabetic symptoms are very likely to develop diabetes within ten years, so if you are diagnosed with pre-diabetes, it is important to delay or even prevent type 2 diabetes through diet and exercise.

Managing Diabetes
You can manage, and to a certain extent, improve, your diabetes through meal planning, exercise, and medications when needed.
Diagnosis for diabetes
The following three tests are used to test for diabetes and pre-diabetes.
- A test measuring your blood glucose after fasting for eight hours is used to detect diabetes or pre diabetes.
-Or, an oral glucose tolerance test can measure your blood glucose after going eight hours without eating.
-You can also test for diabetes using a random plasma glucose test to check your blood glucose without fasting. This test is not used to detect pre-diabetes.