Type 1 Diabetes For Dummies

Alan L. Rubin

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470178119
• eBook ISBN: 9781118051924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies

Learn how to manage Type 1 diabetes for a healthier and happier life! Whether you have been living with type 1 diabetes for some time, or you have just discovered that your child is diabetic, there's a lot you need to know about the new developments in treating, controlling, and living with this disease. Type 1 Diabetes For Dummies, explains everything you need to know and do to make living with type 1 diabetes easier and healthier.

This reassuring, plain-English guide helps you understand and mange the disease with tips on working with your doctor, administering insulin, developing a diet an exercise plan, and coping with illness and travel. You'll find out about the latest technologies of blood glucose monitoring and insulin delivery, and get a handle on everything you need to do to keep yourself or your child healthy, active, and feeling good. Discover how to:

• Overcome short-term complications
• Eat a diabetes-friendly diet
• Use exercise to help control type 1 diabetes
• Handle school, work, and other activities
• Help your child maintain a high quality of life
• Prevent long-term complications
• Be healthier than your friends who don't have diabetes
• Deal with the emotional and psychological effects of the disease
• Choose an insulin pump for yourself or your child
• Calculate insulin dosages

Anyone can live a long, healthy, and productive life with type 1 diabetes. Small Type 1 Diabetes For Dummies delivers every drop of information you need to make sure that you or your child can do just that.

Part I

Defining Type 1 Diabetes

In this part . . .

**IN a DROPCAP**

This part introduces you to type 1 diabetes mellitus. You start with a grand overview of this distinct disease’s development. Then you get into the precise symptoms and the diagnosis process followed by an introduction to the diseases commonly confused with type 1 diabetes, especially type 2 diabetes. Luckily, the information in this part helps ensure that you never confuse them again.

Chapter 1

Dealing with Type 1 Diabetes

In This Chapter

Discovering what type 1 diabetes is

Dealing with physical and emotional effects

Treating type 1 diabetes

Living life to the fullest with type 1 diabetes

In 2005, the most recent year for which there are statistics, there were 340,000 people in the United States with type 1 diabetes (T1DM) according to the Centers for Disease Control. About half were children up to age 20. There are 30,000 new cases every year, almost all in children.

Whether you’re an older child or young adult able to take care of your own diabetes, or a parent or other caregiver for a young child with this disease, you should be aware that there’s a great deal that you can do to minimize both the short- and long-term complications that may develop and live a long and healthy life with T1DM.

What! You don’t believe me! Consider the story of two brothers, Robert and Gerald. Robert is 85 years old and developed T1DM at age 5. Gerald is 90 and developed T1DM at age 16. The physician who follows them, Dr. George L. King, research director of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, studies patients with T1DM who have lived more than 50 years with the disease. He has more than 400 such patients.

Dr. King says that these patients have a lot in common. They

Keep extensive records of their blood sugars, their diet, their exercise, their insulin dosage, and their daily food consumption

Do a lot of exercise

Eat very carefully

Have a very positive outlook

These actions form the basis of effective T1DM treatment, which I introduce in this chapter. I also give you an overview of the potential consequences of T1DM and tips for living well with it.

At the present time, there’s no way to prevent T1DM, but I believe a change isn’t far off and T1DM may be preventable in perhaps in the next five years. The breakthrough will come with the use of stem cells, transplantation, or the elimination of the cause of T1DM. You can read much more about this subject in Chapters 13 and 21.

Understanding What Type 1 Diabetes Is (and Isn’t)

T1DM, simply stated, is an autoimmune disease. Immunity is what protects you from foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses. In autoimmunity, your body mistakenly acts against your own tissues. In T1DM, the immune cells and proteins react against the cells that make insulin, destroying them. (Insulin is the chemical or hormone that controls the blood glucose; glucose is sugar that provides instant energy.)

Although it often begins dramatically, T1DM doesn’t occur overnight. Many patients give a history of several months of increasing thirst and urination, among other symptoms. Also, T1DM usually begins in childhood, but some folks don’t develop it until they’re adults. In either case, to verify a diagnosis of T1DM, a sample of blood is taken and its glucose level is measured. If the patient is fasting, the level should be no more than 125 mg/dl; if there’s no fast, the level should be no more than 199 mg/dl. For further confirmation, tests should be done at two different times to check for inconsistencies. However, a person with a blood glucose of 300 to 500 mg/dl who has an acetone smell on his breath clearly has T1DM until proven otherwise.

So how is type 1 diabetes different from type 2 diabetes (T2DM)? The central problem in T2DM isn’t a lack of insulin but insulin resistance; in other words, the body resists the normal, healthy functioning of insulin. Before the development of T2DM, when a person’s blood glucose is still normal, the level of insulin is abnormally high because the person is resistant to the insulin and therefore more is needed to keep the glucose normal.

To complicate matters, a type of diabetes called Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA) is a cross between T1DM and T2DM; a person with LADA exhibits traits of both diseases.

Chapter 2 details the basics of T1DM, including how insulin works, what goes wrong when blood glucose levels are too high, the specific symptoms to watch for, and gathering a team of doctors and other specialists after a diagnosis. Chapter 3 fully explains how T2DM and LADA are different from T1DM.

Handling the Physical and Emotional Consequences of Type 1 Diabetes

What makes diabetes a difficult disease are the physical complications associated with poor control of the blood glucose. These complications are generally divided into short-term complications and long-term complications.

Short-term complications, which I cover in Chapter 4, are the result of a blood glucose that’s either very low or very high. Low blood glucose (called hypoglycemia) can occur in minutes as a result of too much insulin, too much exercise, or too little food, but high blood glucose often takes several hours to develop. Whereas low blood glucose often can be managed at home, severe high blood glucose (called diabetic ketoacidosis) is an emergency that’s managed by a doctor in the hospital. Nevertheless, it’s important that you understand how it develops in order to prevent it. Chapter 4 describes the signs and symptoms associated with both of these complications and the best ways of handling them.

Long-term complications, which I cover in Chapter 5, can be devastating. It’s much better to prevent them with very careful diabetes management than to try to treat them after they develop. Fortunately, they take 15 or more years to fully develop, and there’s time to slow them down if not reverse them if you’re aware of them. All long-term complications can be detected in the very earliest stages.

The long-term complications consist of eye disease known as retinopathy, kidney disease known as nephropathy, and nerve dise...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I : Defining Type 1 Diabetes
• Chapter 1: Dealing with Type 1 Diabetes
• Chapter 2: Recognizing Type 1 Diabetes
• Chapter 3: Excluding Other Types of Diabetes
• Part II : Considering the Consequences of Type 1 Diabetes
• Chapter 4: Overcoming Short-Term Complications
• Chapter 5: Preventing Long-Term Complications
• Chapter 6: Handling Emotional Effects
• Part III : Treating Type 1 Diabetes
• Chapter 7: Undergoing Essential Tests and Monitoring Blood Glucose
• Chapter 8: Eating a Healthy Diet
• Chapter 9: Exercising to Improve Control of Type 1 Diabetes
• Chapter 10: Understanding the Basics of Using Insulin
• Chapter 11: Delivering Insulin with a Pump
• Chapter 12: Getting a Grip on Other Drugs and Treatments
• Chapter 13: Surveying Kidney, Pancreas, and Pancreatic Islet Transplants
• Part IV : Living with Type 1 Diabetes
• Chapter 14: Adjusting to School, Work, and Other Activities
• Chapter 15: Managing Illness and Travel
• Chapter 16: Going through Pregnancy and Menopause
• Chapter 17: Controlling Type 1 Diabetes in the Elderly
• Part V : The Part of Tens
• Chapter 18: Ten Ways to Involve Kids in Their Own Diabetes Care
• Chapter 19: Ten Commandments for Good Diabetes Management
• Chapter 20: Ten Myths about Type 1 Diabetes
• Chapter 21: Ten of the Latest Discoveries in Type 1 Diabetes
• Part VI : Appendixes
• Appendix A: Glossary
• Appendix B: Resources for the Latest Information
• : Further Reading