What is Diabetes?
Between the stomach and the backbone is an organ called the pancreas. It does many things but one of its jobs
is to produce insulin. Insulin is a hormone which allows the body to make use of sugar, or glucose, which has
passed into the blood stream from the gut after eating. Without insulin the sugar cannot be absorbed into the
body tissues such as muscle and it is passed out in the urine.
Because this makes the urine very sugary the
body compensates by adding a lot of water to it. Diabetes is the name given to the condition when the pancreas
stops making insulin.
You will now understand why your child has probably been passing a lot of urine and therefore having to drink
a lot.
Most children with diabetes have also lost weight by the time the diagnosis is made. Some will have
become ill because the body switches over to using fuels other than glucose and this accounts for the sweet
smell on the breath that some patients get.
How common is children's diabetes?
Diabetes is quite common. In Dundee we see around 28 new cases every year in Tayside and currently have
over 100 children coming to our clinics. Scotland has one of the highest levels of diabetes in the world
but the reasons are still unknown. It isn't to do with eating too many sweets!
What treatment is necessary?
Unfortunately, diabetes cannot be cured because the part of the pancreas that makes insulin is permanently
damaged. However, giving insulin by injection allows the body to run normally again.
Very often this is the only treatment this is required but sometimes the fluid lost before diagnosis has to
be replaced by a drip into a vein in hospital.
Another part of the treatment is care over what food is eaten. Because there is no other word, we have to
call this a diet but we rarely want our patients to lose weight, quite the opposite. Diet simply means taking
more care about food and many families with someone with diabetes find that they all eat more healthily.
Our emphasis all the time is on making the life of a patient with diabetes as normal as possible. There are
very few things that someone with diabetes can't do and very few careers that they can't follow but we will
give you as much advice about these matters as you wish later on.
What causes diabetes?
We don't know the cause but there are probably several parts to the answer. Some people are born with genes
that put them in a higher risk than average of developing diabetes. Perhaps they then get a mild virus infection
which may cause just a cold or "flu" but for some other reason this triggers a reaction in them which causes
damage to their pancreas. We believe that this occurs over several months, even years, before the diabetes
actually develops and a lot of research is going on to find out more about this process, so that in the future,
it might be prevented.
Can other friends or relatives catch diabetes?
No. Diabetes isn't infectious. However, when one member of a family becomes diabetic this is a signal that
others (brothers, sisters and parents) may have a higher risk of developing diabetes too. About 1 in 10 patients
will have someone else in the family who is also diabetic. This is because of the importance of the genes
we are born with as mentioned above.