What is diabetes? In order to understand the disease we firstly need to know about insulin. The role of insulin is to convert the food we eat into various useful substances, discarding everything that is wasteful. It is the job of insulin to see that the useful substances are put to best use for our well-being. The useful substances are used for building cells, are made ready for immediate expenditure as energy and also stored for later energy expenditure. The cause of diabetes is an absolute or lack of the hormone insulin. As a result of this lack of insulin the processes that involve converting the foods we eat into various useful substances does not occur. Insulin comes from the beta cells that are located in the pancreas. In the case of diabetes almost the entire beta cells have been destroyed. Therefore daily injections of insulin become essential to life. One of the products that are of vital importance in our bodies is glucose, a simple carbohydrate sugar that is needed by virtually every part of our body as fuel to function. Insulin controls the amount of glucose distributed to vital organs and also the muscles. In diabetics due to the lack of insulin and therefore the control of glucose given to different body parts they face death if they don't inject themselves with insulin daily. Since strict monitoring of diabetes is needed for the control of the disease, little room is left for carelessness. As a result diabetic patients are susceptible to many other diseases and serious conditions if a proper course of treatment is not followed. Other diseases a diabetic is open to: Cardiovascular disease, stroke, Peripheral artery disease, gangrene, kidney disease, blindness, hypertension, nerve damage, impotence etc. Basically there is an increased incident of infection in diabetic sufferers. Therefore special care needs to be taken to decrease the chances of getting these other serious diseases.
