by Firy

Created on: October 12, 2008   Last Updated: June 19, 2010

Type 1 Diabetes

This form of diabetes has two names: insulin dependent or juvenile diabetes. Why Insulin? Insulin is used to treat all manifestations of hypoglycemia in Type 1 Diabetes.

For all the body functions to occur, energy is required. This energy comes from glucose, which is an end product of breaking down complex sugars that we ingest. In disease states, the simple sugar cannot be transported to all the body parts where it is needed, instead remaining in the blood stream and threatening the entire body. Imagine a balanced meal sitting in front of you at dinner and you not being able to eat it. What good is it? Unless you can eat the food, it is of no benefit to you. It is the same with glucose, unless it can be taken to the parts of the body where it can be transformed into the units the body needs, then the body could face a crisis.

So what needs to happen? Insulin needs to come into action. First let's begin by talking about what Insulin is, what it does and where.

Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas. It occurs in the body as a complex bound to Zinc. Two molecules of Zinc bind six molecules of insulin. There are a few modulators of synthesis and release for insulin. Most of us are familiar with glucose as one of them. Insulin is largely responsible for recruiting glucose into the cell membranes and conveniently enticing genes to make or breakdown glucose. Among other duties, in the liver, Insulin inhibits discourages production of glucose and enhances it breakdown. In muscle it encourages glucose transport and glycolysis plus enhances glycogen disposition. In the adipose tissue, it increases glucose transport.

Imagine now a disease state where there is no Insulin and all the above and more body functions are arrested! It's too scary. Even though there has been much research done in this area, it is still not clear what the cause of Type 1 Diabetes is in young adults, children and teenagers. It has for the most part been linked with autoimmune disease. What this means is that the body somehow recognizes its own beta cells as foreign and therefore goes on a rampage to destroy them.

There is good news for people with this type of a disease and other diseases typified by the body destroying its own cells. The news come with Dr. Denise L Faustman's Lab, the Director of the Immunology Laboratory in Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard School of Medicine. Her study reports indicate that the aggression

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