10 Question Sci / Tech Quiz: Diabetes | Diseases

Answer: 3

The two largest types of diabetes are typically designated simply as diabetes type 1, or diabetes type 2. The third major form of the disease is gestational diabetes.

Type 1 diabetes is caused by the body attacking its own pancreas. The damaged pancreas then doesn't make insulin.

Type 2 diabetes is caused when the body starts to develop a resistance to insulin. The pancreas also doesn't produce enough insulin to regulate blood sugar levels. This can be hereditary or caused by being overweight.

Gestational diabetes is caused by pregnancy. The symptoms present very similarly to type 2, but often go away after the mother gives birth.

Those three forms of diabetes account for more than 95 percent of all cases according to the Center for Disease Control, various are other forms can account for the remaining few percentage points.

Answer: Type 1

Type 1 diabetics generally produce none of their own insulin. Because of that they are referred to as "insulin dependent". Type 2 and gestational diabetics can typically control their issues with diet, exercise and oral medication.

Answer: 422 million

Diabetes, mostly type 2, was one of the fastest growing diseases on the planet in the early part of the 21st century. There were many factors that played into that, since type 2 was growing much faster than all other forms of the disease, and that form is mostly caused through poor diet and lack of exercise. Obesity was also blamed for the rise of the disease.

Answer: 1.5 million

According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.5 million people were directly killed by diabetes in 2012. That doesn't include people who were killed by complications from side effects of the disease. According to the organization, more than 2.2 million more died from those issues that same year.

Only four other diseases caused more deaths in 2012 than diabetes, they were heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Answer: Children

"Children", defined as aged 4 to 17 for this purpose, used to be one of the smallest groups of people in the world with the disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control, that group is one of the fastest growing for new diagnoses of type 2 diabetes from 2000-2016. Type 2 is the form that is caused mostly from poor diet and a lack of exercise.

While not officially, many people blame computers and cellphones causing people to get less exercise and gain weight.

Answer: False

Thankfully this is very much false. I personally was diagnosed with the the disease on 2011, and can expect to live a very long and happy life through a combination of medication, diet and exercise.

When properly treated, diabetes is a very low impact disease on a patient. Medication however can be expensive and lowly insured, or uninsured people often can't afford the hundreds or thousands of dollars needed for proper treatment. A diabetic diet also is very low in carbohydrates, and has as little added sugar as possible. In order to properly eat a diabetic diet, most meals need to be hand made, not come from overly processed foods.

Answer: All of these

All three of these are major concerns for diabetics. One of the first things to happen, especially in untreated diabetics, is small blood vessels being damaged. The eyes, kidneys and fingers and toes all have these smaller blood vessels in them. Nerve damage, especially in the feet, is also a major concern for diabetics.

Answer: True

There are papyrus scrolls that date fact to ancient Egypt that near perfectly describe the symptoms of diabetes. Those symptoms were frequent urination and stinging foot pain.

The disease was named by Aretaeus around the year 90 CE.

Answer: Tasting urine

In ancient times people known as "Water Testers" would actually drink a patient's urine to see if it had a sweet taste. While it wasn't known exactly why at the time, diabetics had sweeter urine than others.

The reason for the sweet urine is the excess sugar being eliminated from the body through urine.

Other ways to check were to leave urine out and see if it attracted flies and bugs. The sugar in the urine would also be that cause of attraction.

Answer: Dr. Richard Bernstein

Only Bernstein was a real person, I made the others up.

Bernstein was in poor health due to his diabetes. In the early 1970s portable glucose monitors were very expensive and only doctors could order them. When he wasn't able to buy one, he convinced his wife, a psychiatrist, to obtain one for him. At the time he was an engineer.

After getting the monitor and being able to test his sugar levels more often and adapt his lifestyle in a way to control his sugar, his condition improved. Because he wasn't a doctor, he struggled to get his findings published in medical journals.

At the age of 43, he started medical school and became an endocrinologist so he could more easily publish his findings to the public. Within a decade of his findings being published, home glucose meters were much more common.