The Top Ten Diabetes Terms

This post is a text preview of a slideshow that my associates at HealthCentral will be preparing next week. This is my way of explaining the most important terms that we have to live with non-technically in 65 words or less each.

Insulin Resistance
When you need more insulin than the beta cells of your pancreas can provide, glucose builds up in your blood instead of going into the cells in the rest of your body. This resistance to your own insulin causes high blood glucose, which doctors call hyperglycemia. It can lead to prediabetes, which in turn can lead to diabetes, if you don’t change your lifestyle.

Type 2 Diabetes
When the cells of your body are resistant for several years to the insulin that the beta cells of your pancreas makes, they compensate by making more insulin. Eventually, however, they works so hard that they can’t keep up and begin to die off. That’s when you get type 2 diabetes, formerly called adult-onset diabetes. But now, even children are getting it.

Type 1 Diabetes
If you have type 1 diabetes (formerly called juvenile diabetes), you usually aren’t resistant to the insulin that your beta cells make. Instead, something else, perhaps an infection, kills most of the beta cells so the rest of the cells in your body get little or no insulin that your body makes. To make up for this lack you have to take insulin shots.

Blood Glucose
When you get either type 1 or type 2 diabetes, the amount of blood glucose is high most of the time. This can lead to the trouble with diabetes, the complications of the disease. We call this high level either high blood glucose, which we often abbreviate as high BG, or as high blood sugar, which isn’t BS.

Testing
We say we test our BG, but what we really do is check its level, which changes all the time depending on what we eat, the exercise we get, and the diabetes medications that we take. A normal level is about 80 to 85 mg/dl. If it’s lower than about 70 mg/dl, we have hypoglycemia, “a hypo.” If it’s higher, we have hyperglycemia.

Blood Glucose Meters
To find out what your level is at the moment, put a test strip in a blood glucose meter. Then, the usual way is to prick the side of one of your fingers to get a small drop of blood. Place the blood drop on the test strip and wait for a few seconds. Finally, hope that the meter gives you an accurate reading.

A1C
The A1C test also uses a small drop of your blood. But instead of hopefully telling you how high or low your BG is, this test tells you what your average level was over the past three months. We sometimes call this a test of hemoglobin A1C or glycohemoglobin or HbA1C. A level below 6.0 is normal.

Diet
Having diabetes means that your body doesn’t do a good job of using the food you eat because of a disturbance of carbohydrate metabolism. It’s those carbs that raise your blood glucose levels. When you reduce the carbs in your diet, your diabetes is easier to manage.

Insulin
Everybody with type 1 diabetes must take insulin shots to compensate for the insulin that your body should have made. About one-quarter of people with type 2 diabetes also take insulin shots. Maybe more type 2s should. Insulin is tricky, because you need to take the right type at the right time in the right amount. But it’s not a medication of last resort.

Cure
Too many people still think because this is the 21st century, we must have a way to cure diabetes. We don’t. But you are able to manage it so well with diet and exercise that you can kick your diabetes into remission. Many people who manage their diabetes well discover that they are healthier and happier than they ever were. You can be too.

This article is based on an earlier version of my article published by HealthCentral.