Diabetes mellitus, usually called diabetes in short, is a disease due to the disorder of the metabolism system in human body.
Metabolism system itself is very important. The system digests the food that we consume in order to help give us energy and help us grow as well. Metabolism system is able to do this by breaking down the food we consume into a kind of substance that we call glucose, which is the sugar form that flows in our blood.
Glucose is where the human body obtains fuel from. It is needed by our cells in order to obtain energy as well as to grow. Yet, to be able to enter our cells, glucose cannot work by itself. It needs to be helped by the insulin which allows the cells in our body to absorb the glucose.
Insulin itself also comes from the human body. Our pancreas produces the hormone which we call the insulin. When we have finished eating our food, our pancreas does what it is supposed to do. It releases as much insulin as necessary in order to take the glucose in our blood into our cells while this, in turn, will lower the level of sugar that is contained in our blood.
But when a person suffers from diabetes, the sugar level, or the glucose, exceeds the required quantity that is needed by our blood. This is called the hyperglycemia. This is possible because our body no longer produces as much insulin as necessary for the blood, or it may have even been unable to produce insulin anymore. Another possibility is that the cells in our body are no longer able to respond accordingly to the insulin produced by our pancreas.
The inability of the human body to cope with the insulin results in an excessive amount of glucose accumulating in our blood. Because the amount is excessive, the glucose will somehow try to find a way out when it will then eventually come out along with our urine. In this case, even though our body possesses more than enough glucose which is required by our blood, the cells in our blood are not capable of absorbing it to fulfill neither our energy nor our growth requirements. This is, of course, not a good situation.
According to the WHO (World Health Organization), the disease of diabetes mellitus consists of three main types which will shortly be described briefly. The first type is the diabetes type 1. Someone who suffers from this diabetes type 1 does not have any insulin at all produced in their body.
We call the second type the diabetes type 2. People who suffer from this diabetes type 2 may have their body producing insulin but just not as much as required or it may as well be that the insulin hormone in their body is not working just as how it is supposed to be.
The last type of the diabetes mellitus disease is better known with the name of gestational diabetes. Usually, women who are pregnant tend to develop this disease of diabetes mellitus during the period of their pregnancy.
The WHO considers diabetes type 1 as well as type 2 as the chronic medical situations since they are perpetual as well as persistent. For gestational diabetes, however, the disease will usually resolve itself after the pregnant women gave birth to their children.