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Lecture Notes

The first type of diabetes is called type 1, and we used to call this childhood-onset, although because type 2, as we'll see, is now occurring more frequently in children, we no longer use the labels of childhood and adult onset diabetes. And this type of diabetes is a chronic, lifelong disease where the pancreas produces little or no insulin to control blood sugar properly. It's an autoimmune disease where the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas are gradually destroyed and eventually fail to produce insulin. When they do this—the insulin is what, again, allows the glucose into your muscle cells and into the other tissues in your body—without that insulin, the glucose stays in your bloodstream, and so in order to treat type 1 diabetes, the person must have an insulin injection or a pump to survive, and we don't have any way to really prevent this from happening.