This video is a part of “.Innovation in sort 1 diabetes”, an editorially impartial particular report produced with monetary assist from. vertex.
Have you ever ever considered how your physique turns meals into power, or how rigorously you should management that course of?
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Once we eat, the glucose from the meals we eat is saved within the liver as glycogen. Then, primarily based on our physique’s wants, the liver converts that glycogen again into glucose, which travels by the blood to our cells the place it could flip that glucose into power.
Our pancreas, then again, produces a hormone known as insulin, whose job is to enter the bloodstream and inform our cells to take up glucose. Insulin additionally regulates blood sugar ranges in our our bodies and prevents issues that happen when blood sugar ranges are too excessive or too low.
When the pancreas stops producing insulin, glucose not enters our cells. As a substitute, it accumulates within the bloodstream. In some individuals, the pancreas could cease producing insulin altogether. This situation is named sort 1 diabetes.
Though the precise trigger stays a thriller, it’s recognized that the illness happens when immune cells goal and assault insulin-producing cells within the pancreas known as beta cells. When these cells are destroyed, the physique stops producing insulin and loses an essential regulator of blood sugar ranges. This can lead to a wide range of signs, together with fatigue and weak spot.
All through the twentieth and twenty first centuries, scientists have developed methods that make sort 1 diabetes treatable. These embrace meters to test blood sugar ranges and pumps to manage small quantities of insulin. And advances in building and software program have made these instruments smaller and extra transportable. Regardless of these advances, scientists are nonetheless in search of remedies for sort 1 diabetes.
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