Diabetes And Its Impact On Your Urinary And Sexual Health

Diabetes and Its Impact on Your Urinary and Sexual Health

Diabetes and urological health issues are closely connected. Diabetics are prone to urinary tract infections (UTIs), bladder issues and sexual dysfunction. Diabetes can often make your urologic conditions even worse because it can impact blood flow, nerves and sensory function in the body. Roughly 29.1 million people or 9.3 % of Americans have diabetes.
Diabetes is a disease in which your blood glucose (blood sugar) levels are too high. Glucose is the body's main source of fuel and comes from the foods you eat.
After your body breaks down food, glucose enters the bloodstream. The cells in your body need this sugar for energy, but a hormone called insulin must be present for the glucose to enter the cells. Your pancreas, a large gland that sits behind the stomach, is what makes the insulin.
In people without diabetes, the pancreas makes the right amount of insulin to move the sugar from the blood into the cells. But, in people with type 1 diabetes, the body doesn't make insulin at all. In people with type 2 diabetes, the body doesn't make or use insulin the right way. This is called insulin resistance. Without enough insulin, glucose stays in the blood. Having too much of this in the bloodstream can harm your kidneys, eyes and other organs.
The A1C test is used by doctors to see how well you're taking care of your diabetes. This blood test gives facts about a person's blood sugar levels over the past two to three months. The American Diabetes Association suggests an A1C of 7 percent or below.
Bladder Conditions and Urinary Tract Infections
"Diabetes can affect the function a Continue reading

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Diabetes & Urinary Tract Infections: What You Need to Know About UTIs?

Ever felt the urgent need to pee? Well everyone has one of those days. But what if the urgent need to pee is followed by a burning sensation when you finally pee? And what if the pee turns out cloudy and foul-drenching smelly? Turns out, this one isn’t just one of those days. What it might indicate is Urinary Tract Infection, something in the ilk of urinary or bladder infection.
There’s quite a relation between the urinary tract infection and diabetes and we here would depict the same in today’s entry of ours.
Let’s start off with the UTI then, shall we?
What’s Urinary Tract Infection (UTI)?
Generalized as the urinary tract infection, UTI affects kidneys, bladder, urethra and prostate as per the gender. However, most of the cases include the occurrence of UTI in the bladder region, where the urine is stored.
The root cause of UTI
The urinary tract system, the very system which is known to safeguard the body gets infected with the bacteria which results in the UTI. These bacteria originate mostly from bowel region. That severally affects the normal functioning of the urinary tract system.
As for a little insight, here’s how Urinary Tract system functions normally. The urinary system is it ureters, carries the urine from the kidney to the bladder region. The ureters have a valve system that stops any urine from staying back in the kidney for long. The bladder then empties the content out via urination and keeps the body free of bacterial particles.
The relation between Diabetes and UTI
UTI is often seen as the second most common infection type in diabetes. UTI on Continue reading

Diabetes, weight can combine to alter brain, study says

(CNN)It's well-known that type 2 diabetes can cause medical complications in certain organs, including the brain. But overweight and obese people with early-stage type 2 diabetes have more severe abnormalities in brain structure and cognition than normal-weight people with type 2 diabetes, according to a new study in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.
Having type 2 diabetes and being overweight, then, can combine to have a greater effect on brain structures.
"There's a general agreement that type 2 diabetes is a risk factor for various types of both structural and functional abnormalities in the brain," said Dr. Donald C. Simonson, a co-author of the study and an endocrinologist specializing in diabetes. "Simple obesity also shows the same type of abnormalities ... in a milder stage. You can see where it's not quite exactly normal but not quite as bad as someone with diabetes.
"So, if you have both, will it be worse than if you have them alone? That's what we looked at in this particular study," said Simonson, who teaches at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. In Kyoon Lyoo, lead author and a professor at the Ewha Brain Institute at Ewha Womens University in Seoul, South Korea, wrote in an email, "As obesity has been known to be associated with metabolic dysfunction, inflammation, and brain changes independently of diabetes, we expected that brain alterations might be more pronounced in overweight/obese participants with type 2 diabetes."
Lyoo, Simonson and their colleagues designed a study around 50 overweight or o Continue reading

Honey and Cinnamon for Diabetes Treatment

In the past several years, honey and cinnamon have become stars in the realm of complementary medicine. Both are rumored to cure or at least help manage all sorts of ailments, including diabetes. While both honey and cinnamon have properties that may benefit health, their usefulness in controlling diabetes is debatable. According to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), available evidence does not support the use of cinnamon or honey as a means to improve blood glucose levels. More human research is needed to understand if these items have a future role in diabetes management.
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Diabetes is a long-term condition that causes elevated blood glucose levels, so it may seem counter-intuitive to link this carbohydrate-rich food to improved diabetes control. However, there is some preliminary research that suggests honey could improve blood glucose levels. When diabetic rats were given both honey and one of two diabetes drugs -- metformin or glibenclamide -- their blood glucose levels improved more than those given only the medication, according to a study published in the March 2011 "International Journal of Biological Sciences." The authors postulate that honey's high fructose content -- a simple sugar that has a neutral effect on blood glucose -- may be one of the reasons for the noted benefits. Of interest, it's unknown if humans eating honey from the United States would have a glucose-lowering benefit, as this rat study used tualang or wild rain forest honey, which has a higher fructose content compared to U.S honey.
Honey and Human Research
For humans with Continue reading

Type 1 diabetes treatment could end need for insulin shots

Insulin shots could become a thing of the past for type 1 diabetes patients thanks to a technology being developed by Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, a London-based not-for-profit organisation, and Aberdeen University.
The pre-clinical results have encouraged CGT and Aberdeen University to create a spin-out company, called Islexa. It will manufacture lab-grown islets, the organoids responsible for insulin production, by reprogramming donated pancreatic tissue.
Only 30-50 people with type 1 diabetes in the UK currently receive an islet transplant each year, owing to a lack of donors and the difficulty of extracting islets from pancreatic tissue.
Growing islets will “significantly increase the number of patients who can receive the treatment,” Keith Thompson, CGT’s chief executive, told the World Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine congress in London on Wednesday. He will run Islexa with Michael Bennet from CGT and Anne Lewendon from Aberdeen University.
If clinical trials are successful, the technology means tens of thousands more people could live without the need for frequent insulin injections, although it will take a few years until the treatment is available.
About 320,000 people in Britain have type 1 diabetes, a number set to more than double to 652,000 by 2035. Around the world, 21 million people have type 1 diabetes.
It is a lifelong condition that occurs when the pancreas does not produce any insulin, while type 2 diabetes – far more common, especially as obesity rises around the world – is a condition where the pancreas does not produce enough insulin o Continue reading