Diabetes is a lifelong condition that causes a person’s blood sugar level to become too high. There are 2 main types of diabetes:
type 1 diabetes – where the body’s immune system attacks and destroys the cells that produce insulin type 2 diabetes – where the body does not produce enough insulin, or the body’s cells do not react to insulin
Type 2 diabetes is far more common than type 1. In the UK, around 90% of all adults with diabetes have type 2. During pregnancy, some women have such high levels of blood glucose that their body is unable to produce enough insulin to absorb it all. This is known as gestational diabetes,
What is the main difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes?
The main difference between the type 1 and type 2 diabetes is that type 1 diabetes is a genetic condition that often shows up early in life, and type 2 is mainly lifestyle-related and develops over time. With type 1 diabetes, your immune system is attacking and destroying the insulin-producing cells in your pancreas.
- Although type 1 and type 2 diabetes both have things in common, there are lots of differences.
- Like what causes them, who they affect, and how you should manage them.
- For a start, type 1 affects 8% of everyone with diabetes.
- While type 2 diabetes affects about 90%.
- Some people get confused between type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
This can mean you have to explain that what works for one type doesn’t work for the other, and that there are different causes. The main thing to remember is that both are as serious as each other. Having high blood glucose (or sugar) levels can lead to serious health complications, no matter whether you have type 1 or type 2 diabetes.
How do we know if it is type 1 or type 2 diabetes?
What is type 1 diabetes? A Mayo Clinic expert explains – Learn more about type 1 diabetes from endocrinologist Yogish Kudva, M.B.B.S. I’m Dr. Yogish C. Kudva an endocrinologist at Mayo Clinic. In this video, we’ll cover the basics of type 1 diabetes. What is it? Who gets it? The symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment.
- Whether you’re looking for answers for yourself or someone you love.
- We are here to give you the best information available.
- Type 1 diabetes is a chronic condition that affects the insulin making cells of the pancreas.
- It’s estimated that about 1.25 million Americans live with it.
- People with type 1 diabetes don’t make enough insulin.
An important hormone produced by the pancreas. Insulin allows your cells to store sugar or glucose and fat and produce energy. Unfortunately, there is no known cure. But treatment can prevent complications and also improve everyday life for patients with type 1 diabetes.
Lots of people with type 1 diabetes live a full life. And the more we learn and develop treatment for the disorder, the better the outcome. We don’t know what exactly causes type 1 diabetes. We believe that it is an auto-immune disorder where the body mistakenly destroys insulin producing cells in the pancreas.
Typically, the pancreas secretes insulin into the bloodstream. The insulin circulates, letting sugar enter your cells. This sugar or glucose, is the main source of energy for cells in the brain, muscle cells, and other tissues. However, once most insulin producing cells are destroyed, the pancreas can’t produce enough insulin, meaning the glucose can’t enter the cells, resulting in an excess of blood sugar floating in the bloodstream.
- This can cause life-threatening complications.
- And this condition is called diabetic ketoacidosis.
- Although we don’t know what causes it, we do know certain factors can contribute to the onset of type 1 diabetes.
- Family history.
- Anyone with a parent or sibling with type 1 diabetes has a slightly increased risk of developing it.
Genetics. The presence of certain genes can also indicate an increased risk. Geography. Type 1 diabetes becomes more common as you travel away from the equator. Age, although it can occur at any age there are two noticeable peaks. The first occurs in children between four and seven years of age and the second is between 10 and 14 years old.
- Signs and symptoms of type 1 diabetes can appear rather suddenly, especially in children.
- They may include increased thirst, frequent urination, bed wetting in children who previously didn’t wet the bed.
- Extreme hunger, unintended weight loss, fatigue and weakness, blurred vision, irritability, and other mood changes.
If you or your child are experiencing any of these symptoms, you should talk to your doctor. The best way to determine if you have type 1 diabetes is a blood test. There are different methods such as an A1C test, a random blood sugar test, or a fasting blood sugar test.
- They are all effective and your doctor can help determine what’s appropriate for you.
- If you are diagnosed with diabetes, your doctor may order additional tests to check for antibodies that are common in type 1 diabetes in the test called C-peptide, which measures the amount of insulin produced when checked simultaneously with a fasting glucose.
These tests can help distinguish between type 1 and type 2 diabetes when a diagnosis is uncertain. If you have been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, you may be wondering what treatment looks like. It could mean taking insulin, counting carbohydrates, fat protein, and monitoring your glucose frequently, eating healthy foods, and exercising regularly to maintain a healthy weight.
Generally, those with type 1 diabetes will need lifelong insulin therapy. There are many different types of insulin and more are being developed that are more efficient. And what you may take may change. Again, your doctor will help you navigate what’s right for you. A significant advance in treatment from the last several years has been the development and availability of continuous glucose monitoring and insulin pumps that automatically adjust insulin working with the continuous glucose monitor.
This type of treatment is the best treatment at this time for type 1 diabetes. This is an exciting time for patients and for physicians that are keen to develop, prescribe such therapies. Surgery is another option. A successful pancreas transplant can erase the need for additional insulin.
However, transplants aren’t always available, not successful and the procedure can pose serious risks. Sometimes it may outweigh the dangers of diabetes itself. So transplants are often reserved for those with very difficult to manage conditions. A successful transplant can bring life transforming results.
However, surgery is always a serious endeavor and requires ample research and concentration from you, your family, and your medical team. The fact that we don’t know what causes type 1 diabetes can be alarming. The fact that we don’t have a cure for it even more so.
- But with the right doctor, medical team and treatment, type 1 diabetes can be managed.
- So those who live with it can get on living.
- If you would like to learn even more about type 1 diabetes, watch our other related videos or visit mayoclinic.org.
- We wish you well.
- Diabetes mellitus refers to a group of diseases that affect how the body uses blood sugar (glucose).
Glucose is an important source of energy for the cells that make up the muscles and tissues. It’s also the brain’s main source of fuel. The main cause of diabetes varies by type. But no matter what type of diabetes you have, it can lead to excess sugar in the blood.
Too much sugar in the blood can lead to serious health problems. Chronic diabetes conditions include type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes. Potentially reversible diabetes conditions include prediabetes and gestational diabetes. Prediabetes happens when blood sugar levels are higher than normal. But the blood sugar levels aren’t high enough to be called diabetes.
And prediabetes can lead to diabetes unless steps are taken to prevent it. Gestational diabetes happens during pregnancy. But it may go away after the baby is born.
What happens if you don’t treat diabetes type 1?
What’s the Difference Between Untreated Type 1 Diabetes and Untreated Type 2 Diabetes? – Type 1 diabetes is when your pancreas doesn’t produce any insulin at all. If left untreated, it can cause atherosclerosis (narrowing of blood vessels), heart disease, stroke, and eye and kidney diseases.
Is type 1 diabetes the highest?
Views: Views equals page views plus PDF downloads – Currently 23 million U.S. adults have been diagnosed with diabetes ( 1 ). The two most common forms of diabetes are type 1 and type 2. Type 1 diabetes results from the autoimmune destruction of the pancreas’s beta cells, which produce insulin. Persons with type 1 diabetes require insulin for survival; insulin may be given as a daily shot or continuously with an insulin pump ( 2 ). Type 2 diabetes is mainly caused by a combination of insulin resistance and relative insulin deficiency ( 3 ). A small proportion of diabetes cases might be types other than type 1 or type 2, such as maturity-onset diabetes of the young or latent autoimmune diabetes in adults ( 3 ). Although the majority of prevalent cases of type 1 and type 2 diabetes are in adults, national data on the prevalence of type 1 and type 2 in the U.S. adult population are sparse, in part because of the previous difficulty in classifying diabetes by type in surveys ( 2, 4, 5 ). In 2016, supplemental questions to help distinguish diabetes type were added to the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) ( 6 ). This study used NHIS data from 2016 to estimate the prevalence of diagnosed diabetes among adults by primary type. Overall, based on self-reported type and current insulin use, 0.55% of U.S. adults had diagnosed type 1 diabetes, representing 1.3 million adults; 8.6% had diagnosed type 2 diabetes, representing 21.0 million adults. Of all diagnosed cases, 5.8% were type 1 diabetes, and 90.9% were type 2 diabetes; the remaining 3.3% of cases were other types of diabetes. Understanding the prevalence of diagnosed diabetes by type is important for monitoring trends, planning public health responses, assessing the burden of disease for education and management programs, and prioritizing national plans for future type-specific health services. NHIS is an annual, cross-sectional household interview survey conducted by CDC that gathers health-related data in a nationally representative sample of the civilian, noninstitutionalized U.S. population ( 6 ). The 2016 NHIS Sample Adult Core consisted of 33,028 adults aged ≥18 years, with a final response rate of 54.3%. Each respondent was randomly selected among all adults aged ≥18 years in each household. During face-to-face interviews, respondents were asked whether a doctor or health care professional had ever told them that they had diabetes, other than during pregnancy. Among those who said they had diabetes, questions were asked regarding age at diagnosis and insulin and oral hypoglycemic medication use. In 2016, respondents were also asked to report whether they had type 1, type 2, or another type of diabetes. Virtually all patients with type 1 diabetes require insulin to survive, and very few persons who use insulin do not report using it ( 5 ). Previous studies have found that self-reported diabetes type alone is not a valid method for classifying diabetes type in surveys because some patients are not aware of their diabetes type ( 5, 7 ). Therefore, for this analysis, type 1 diabetes was defined as current insulin use and self-report of type 1 diabetes. Adults who reported having type 1 diabetes but reported not using insulin were classified as having type 2 diabetes, as were persons who reported type 2 diabetes, unknown diabetes type, or who would not report diabetes type. Respondents who reported having another diabetes type were classified as having “other type.” Crude prevalence estimates of diagnosed diabetes by type and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated for the overall population and by selected sociodemographic characteristics. P values were calculated from chi-squared tests and were considered significant at <0.05. Final survey weights were applied to the data to adjust for various probabilities of selection and household nonresponse. Statistical software was used to account for NHIS's complex sampling design. A total of 3,519 respondents aged ≥18 years reported having diabetes, including 211 classified as having type 1; 3,210 classified as having type 2 (including 182 who reported having type 1, but not taking insulin; 2,897 who reported having type 2; one who reported an unknown type; and one refusal); and 98 classified as having "other" type. In 2016, the overall crude prevalence of diagnosed diabetes among U.S. adults was 9.44% (95% CI = 9.01–9.88). The prevalences of type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and other diabetes types were 0.55%, 8.58%, and 0.31%, respectively ( Table ). The weighted percentages of all diagnosed diabetes cases that were type 1 and type 2 were 5.8% and 90.9%, respectively; the remaining were other types. Based on the weighted NHIS population, the estimated numbers of adults with type 1, type 2, and other diabetes types were 1.3 million, 21.0 million, and 0.8 million, respectively. Estimated crude prevalence of type 1 diabetes among U.S. adults did not significantly vary by age group (p = 0.54) or education (p = 0.14) (Table). The prevalence of type 1 diabetes was higher among men (0.64%) than among women (0.46%) (p<0.05) and higher among non-Hispanic whites (whites) (0.67%) than among Hispanics (0.22%) (p<0.01). By age group, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes was highest among adults aged ≥65 years and lowest among adults aged 18–29 years (p<0.001), and by race/ethnicity, was higher among non-Hispanic blacks (11.52%) than among non-Hispanic Asians (6.89%), whites (7.99%), and Hispanics (9.07%) (p<0.001) (Table). The prevalence of type 2 diabetes decreased with higher levels of educational attainment (p<0.001).
Which type of diabetes is the most severe and unstable?
Brittle Diabetes: What It Is, Symptoms, Causes, Management Brittle diabetes is also known as unstable diabetes or labile diabetes, meaning that blood sugar swings can be severe and frequent. This version is rare and happens mainly to people with Type 1 diabetes.
- Talk to your healthcare provider about management methods, possibly including special equipment.
- Brittle diabetes is that’s especially difficult to manage and often disrupts everyday life.
- People with brittle diabetes have severe swings in blood glucose (blood sugar).
- The swings can cause frequent episodes of (low blood sugar) or (high blood sugar).
Brittle diabetes is sometimes called labile diabetes or unstable diabetes.