Research paper on diabetes - Essay Example

A number of major findings also contributed much to the contemporary knowledge of diabetes: taking out the pancreas will result in diabetes; the pancreas generates insulin in Langerhans’s group of cells; and giving insulin to a diabetic person is effectual medication (Pompei 39). The Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1923 was given to Banting and Best for their development of insulin and provision of insulin treatment to a teenager suffering from diabetes. It is now known that diabetes mellitus can be the outcome of lack of insulin, damaged insulin production, or resistance to the effect of insulin (Bertera 33).

This knowledge was supported and enhanced by advancements in the capacity to measure levels of insulin in the mid-20th century. Some individuals with diabetes mellitus lack quantifiable insulin, whereas others, in spite of sufficient secretion of insulin, either do not produce it in a way that sustains normal physiological processes, or have organs unresponsive to its impact (Bertera 33). Nowadays it is known that a number of pathogenic mechanisms can lead to diabetes and that there is a vital connection between an individual’s genetic composition and environmental forces.

Diabetes mellitus is a set of metabolic illnesses typified by high amounts of blood sugar because of defects in the secretion of insulin, insulin functioning, or both. . Since the illness could be asymptomatic for a number of years, it is approximated that numerous older people with diabetes are not aware of their disease (Pompei 40). The commonness of this illness differs with ethnicity and racial affiliation. Hispanic whites and Hispanic blacks are roughly 1.8 times more prone to have diabetes than non-Hispanic whites (Pompei 40-41).

In spite of an extended asymptomatic duration, diabetes is a severe illness related to reduced life expectancy and considerable morbidity. The kind of diabetes usually impinging on older adults is related to a rate of mortality almost twice that of individuals without this illness and a decade shorter life expectancy (Bertera 35). Inadequately regulated diabetes can be the source of dangerous deterioration in an older individual and is manifested by functional disability, muscle impairment, loss of weight, and fatigue.

More permanent complications of this disease involve neuropathies, kidney failure, and poor eyesight. The prevalence of kidney disease, stroke, and cardiovascular disease is intensified, and the possibility of complete loss of eyesight is heightened roughly by 40% in older adults with diabetes (Bertera 35-36). Diabetes is one of the major serious illnesses, and hence one of the major public health concerns nowadays, and its overwhelming estimated growth is mostly because of the aging of the population alongside industrialization, urbanization, and the obesity outbreak.

In the 1970s, the National Diabetes Prevention and Control Program was formed to advance education, raise awareness, and regulate and prevent complications by circulating empirical knowledge (Pompei 42). Findings from empirical research are being analyzed and disseminated on a regular