Millions of people have too sweet blood: they suffer from Causes of Diabetes. This means that your body no longer produces insulin or stops responding to the hormone. This has serious consequences. Normally, insulin transports the sugar from food into the cells, where it is immediately turned into energy. If this does not happen, the permanently high blood sugar level can destroy veins, nerves, and kidneys in the long term.
Experts distinguish between more than half a dozen different variants of the metabolic disorder that have different causes. However, the most common types of diabetes are type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes, which is presented below. The gestational diabetes is also considered.
Type 1 Diabetes
When the Body Fights itself
The importance of insulin is especially evident when it is missing. That's exactly what people with type 1 diabetes do. Your pancreas cannot produce the hormone because of the cells responsible for it, the beta cells, are almost completely destroyed. The result: the blood sugar rises to a lethal value.
Responsible for the mass dying of beta-cells is the immune system of people with type 1 diabetes. The body’s own defense does not recognize the beta-cells as part of the body, but classifies them as harmful invaders and destroys the supposed pests. Such misguided body defenses often appear as early as childhood or adolescence. Therefore, doctors call type 1 diabetes "adolescent diabetes". He can, however, occur at any age.
Measles Viruses Could be the Trigger
Some people with Type 1 diabetes have a genetic predisposition to the disease that they can inherit. However, for it to break out or continue, it probably needs an extra trigger.
Some scientists suspect that a viral infection can mislead the immune system so that it can no longer distinguish between its own cells and intruders. The suspected germs include measles, mumps, and rubella viruses. Even the so-called Coxsackie viruses are suspected of being able to manipulate the body's defense. These pathogens usually cause colds, but can also cause meningitis and heart muscle inflammation.
Type 2 Diabetes
Insulin works like a door opener
The hormone ensures that the body cells can absorb the sugar from the blood. However, people with type 2 diabetes need more and more insulin over the years to get the sugar into the cells because their cells become less sensitive to the hormone over time - until they stop responding. Some researchers suspect that the beta cells in the pancreas eventually cope with the constant overexertion and subsequently produce less or no insulin. To stay in the picture: The cell door then remains closed. 90 percent of all diabetics suffer from this form of diabetes.
Fast Food and Anger leave Cells Dull
When the cells stop responding to insulin, it usually has two causes. On the one hand, inheritance plays an important role in type 2 diabetes. If one parent is ill, the risk for the child is about 40 percent. If both mother and father have diabetes type 2, the risk for the child increases to 80 percent. But parents do not just inherit a diabetes gene. Scientists have been able to identify various metabolic genes involved in the development of type 2 diabetes in recent years.
In addition, an unhealthy lifestyle can promote this disease. The main risks are:
Obesity, especially the abdominal fat: Men with a waist circumference greater than 102 centimeters are three and a half times more likely to become diabetic than men with a normal waist circumference.
Too little exercise: If you sit a lot, you will gain weight faster. And overweight favors diabetes type 2.
Cigarettes: Smokers are twice as likely to become diabetic as non-smokers.
Poor rest: Sleep disturbances, snoring or breathing interruptions during sleep increase the likelihood of getting type 2 diabetes. Because when the sleep-wake cycle is disturbed, the body releases stress hormones. Such messengers make body cells quickly become insensitive to insulin.
Another explanation for the development of diabetes type 2 has the Lübeck researcher Achim Peters. He suspects that stress, frustration or grief can also cause diabetes. Emotional stress can upset the metabolism in the brain and lead to obesity and diabetes. This theory is not proven yet but would explain some bad habits.
Gestational diabetes
It starts when the abdomen starts to thicken, and it usually ends when the baby is there: Three to seven percent of all pregnant women in Central Europe develop gestational diabetes due to altered metabolism.
The triggers for this form of diabetes are probably hormones that are produced in particularly high quantities during pregnancy. These include the female hormones estrogenic, progestin and the so-called placental lactogenic.
In addition, some women have cravings during pregnancy, so they take a lot of sweets. In order to cope with the large amounts of sugar, the pancreas releases more and more insulin. In some women, the organ with the production is no longer behind, in others, the cells no longer respond to the hormone. The result in both cases: The blood sugar value shoots up.
The risk of getting gestational diabetes increases among women who are overweight, have had diabetes in their family, have had more miscarriages, and are more than 30 years old at birth. It also increases if the women have already given birth to a baby over four kilos of birth weight, or if they have had too high blood glucose in a previous pregnancy.
Usually, after birth, everything returns to normal: the blood sugar level drops, the symptoms disappear. However, about half of all women with gestational diabetes fall ill with type 2 diabetes or, more rarely, with type 1 diabetes.
Other causes of diabetes
There are about a dozen different forms of diabetes. Compared with type 1 diabetes, type 2 and gestational diabetes, however, the other forms are very rare. Some are inherited, others are due to inflammation or tumors.
In one form, sufferers suffer from a specific genetic defect in the beta cells of the pancreas. As a result, they produce too little insulin. If other genomic snippets are damaged, there is enough insulin, but the hormone fails its effect because the cells do not respond to the messenger substance. Even so, diabetes can develop.
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