Diabetes Blog | Diabetes Type, Treatment, & Recipes

Diabetes Treatment

Diabetes Treatment varies from one patient to another depending on their general health, age, medical history, and whether they have complications and other medical problems.

For patients with insulin-dependent diabetes such as juvenile diabetes and gestational diabetes, it is important to take in injections of insulin, which can be short action or long action insulin injections. Insulin should be injected and never be taken in by mouth because it will be destroyed by the digestive system before it reaches the bloodstream. Insulin injections are usually taken three times a day and around mealtimes, but this may vary depending on the condition of the patient. As much as possible, the patient himself should be able to inject the insulin on his own in case that there is no one available to do it for him. A carefully planned diet should also be followed to decrease the patient’s blood sugar level.

Most of the patients with non-insulin-dependent diabetes or Type 2 diabetes are first instructed to reduce their blood sugar level by caloric restriction and proper exercise. The caloric content rather than the type of food eaten is the most important consideration, which is why a patient who has Type 2 diabetes does not necessarily have to remove sugar from his diet. If caloric restriction did not decrease the blood sugar level satisfactorily, patients are then given an oral hypoglycemic agent such as sulfonylureas. Although hypoglycemic drugs may directly influence the metabolism of glucose, they just simply act as stimulants for insulin secretion, so insulin injection is another option in case that this form of treatment still did not work.

Another way of treating diabetes is the transplantation of the pancreas. These beta cells are the ones responsible for the production of insulin. Immunosupressive drugs are given to patients who have just undergone a transplant of pancreas, since the immune system seeks to destroy the newly transplanted pancreas in most patients. Unfortunately, immunosuppressive drugs are not uniformly efficacious and have a variety of undesired side-effects, so more powerful and less toxic drugs are still under development for the purpose of optimizing the transplantation of pancreas.