Type 3 Diabetes: Scientists Discover Entirely New Form Of Disease—And It's Being Misdiagnosed

Type 3 Diabetes: Scientists Discover Entirely New Form of Disease—And It's Being Misdiagnosed

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Most people are familiar with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Recently, though, a new type of diabetes has been identified: type 3c.
Type 1 diabetes is where the body’s immune system destroys the insulin producing cells of the pancreas. It usually starts in childhood or early adulthood and almost always needs insulin treatment. Type 2 diabetes occurs when the pancreas can’t keep up with the insulin demand of the body. It is often associated with being overweight or obese and usually starts in middle or old age, although the age of onset is decreasing.
Type 3c diabetes is caused by damage to the pancreas from inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), tumours of the pancreas, or pancreatic surgery. This type of damage to the pancreas not only impairs the organ’s ability to produce insulin but also to produce the proteins needed to digest food (digestive enzymes) and other hormones.
However, our latest study has revealed that most cases of type 3c diabetes are being wrongly diagnosed as type 2 diabetes. Only three percent of the people in our sample—of more than 2 million—were correctly identified as having type 3c diabetes.
Small studies in specialist centers have found that most people with type 3c diabetes need insulin and, unlike with other diabetes types, can also benefit from taking digestive enzymes with food. These are taken as a tablet with meals and snacks.
Researchers and specialist doctors have recently become concerned that type 3c diabetes might be much more common than Continue reading

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Beer and Diabetes: Can Diabetics Drink Beer? Know the Facts

A disease which is slowly become rampant all across the globe, Diabetes is caused either due to the lack of proper production of insulin by the pancreas or due to the improper use of insulin in the human body. This gives rise to the blood sugar level or the glucose level in the body.
The disease is often associated with a host of other complications as well and as such, diabetes is something that needs to be taken care off. Experts have often recommended a well-regulated lifestyle and diet to tackle the problem. One such regulation is the amount of beer consumption. The presence of alcohol in beer is often known to create high blood sugar levels. It also adversely affects the metabolism of the body.
In this article, we try to find out the relation between diabetes and beer consumption. We shall delve deep and analyze whether it is safe to consume beer for a diabetes patient. Join in for the article ‘Beer and Diabetes: Can Diabetics Drink Beer? Know the Facts’.
The thing with Beer and Diabetes
Many people often ask the question whether the beer is something which should be consumed by a diabetes patient. While some people argue that beer should be avoided completely, others are of the view that after taking a few precautionary measures, beer can be had in a reasonable amount.
However, if the amount of beer consumed increases and the precautionary measures are all ignored, drinking beer could be highly harmful to a person suffering from diabetes. In the following paragraphs, we delve deeper into the same and find out some facts related to diabetes and beer and whether it Continue reading

Diabetes drugs cost NHS nearly £1bn a year

The cost to the NHS of prescribing drugs for diabetes has soared to almost £1bn a year, as the number of people diagnosed with the disease has risen sharply alongside the surge in obesity.
The NHS in England spent £956.7m on drugs last year prescribed by GPs, nurses and pharmacists to treat and manage the condition. That sum represents 10.6% of the cost of all prescriptions issued by NHS primary care services in 2015-16.
The health service now spends more on medication for type 1 and type 2 diabetes than for any other ailment. The number of diabetics across the UK as a whole has recently risen to more than four million and has increased by 65% over the last 10 years.
The cost of diabetes drugs has almost doubled in a decade, new data from NHS Digital show. That £956.7m was a huge rise on the £513.9m it spent on them in 2005-06 which, at the time, was just 6% of the NHS’s total drugs bill.
Diabetes is thought to cost the NHS about £10bn, once the cost of treatment, including amputation and hospitalisations for life-threatening hypoglycaemic attacks, is included.
Last year a total of 49.7m items were prescribed for diabetes, compared to 27.1m a decade years earlier, when just 53 items were prescribed for every 100 people; that had risen to 91 last year.
Just under nine in 10 (89.1%) diabetics have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which is closely associated with people’s lifestyles, especially their weight.
However, type 1 diabetes – whose sufferers include Theresa May – is an autoimmune condition. It often emerges in childhood, though the prime minister, 59, Continue reading

Who was Sir Frederick Banting and how did he discover that insulin could treat diabetes?

Millions of people around the world suffer from diabetes, but until the 1920s there was no treatment for it.
Sir Frederick Banting was a Canadian scientist whose pioneering work using insulin to treat diabetes earned him the Nobel prize. He only lived to be 49 but on November 14 - what would have been his 125th birthday - Google has celebrated him with a commemorative Doodle.
November 14 is also World Diabetes Day.
How does insulin work?
For your body to use glucose, the fuel that comes from carbohydrates, it must be transferred from the blood to your body’s cells to be used up as energy.
The vital hormone that allows glucose to enter cells is called insulin and it is normally produced naturally in the pancreas. If this process doesn’t happen, the level of sugar in the blood becomes too high.
Being unable to naturally produce insulin is the disease known as diabetes. More than 4 million people in the UK are diagnosed with it, and it is a major cause of kidney failure, heart attacks and blindness.
Who was Sir Frederick Banting?
Frederick Banting was born on November 14 1891 in Alliston, a settlement in the Canadian province of Ontario. He served in the First World War despite initially being refused while in medical school for poor eyesight since the army wanted more doctors on the front line.
After the war, Sir Frederick had become deeply interested in diabetes and the pancreas, reading much of the work on the matter that had come before him.
Scientists including Edward Schafer had speculated that diabetes was caused by a lack of a protein hormone produced in the pancre Continue reading

Can turmeric help manage diabetes? What the evidence says

Turmeric has been used for centuries in both food and medicine. The spice is believed to have many potential benefits for the human body. But could turmeric be a new tool to help manage diabetes?
Turmeric is the common name for the root Curcuma longa. It is a bright yellow-orange spice that is a staple in traditional food dishes from many Asian countries.
In this article we explore the role of turmeric in alternative and Western medicine. We go on to analyze the potential benefits of the spice for diabetes management.
Turmeric and medicine
Turmeric plays an important role in medical practices, such as Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).
Medical science is interested in the herb, as well, due to the high levels of friendly compounds it contains. Of particular interest is a class of compounds called curcuminoids.
One curcuminoid found in turmeric is curcumin. This name is sometimes loosely used to describe all of the curcuminoids in turmeric.
Turmeric and curcumin are being studied for a number of human conditions such as:
inflammatory bowel disease
h. pylori infections
Turmeric is also often added to the diet to help reduce inflammation and oxidative stress.
Can turmeric help people with diabetes?
Including turmeric in the diet seems to promote general wellbeing. There is also evidence that indicates turmeric may be especially beneficial for people with diabetes.
It is believed that curcumin is the source of many of the medical benefits of turmeric. The focus of most research has been on curcumin itself, rather than whole turmeric.
A review in the journal Eviden Continue reading