Diabetes is a disease the body undergoes when it is unable to produce any or enough insulin, due to a high level of glucose in the blood. According to the website diabetes.org, statistics show that, “diabetes was the seventh leading cause of death in the United States in 2010 based on the 69,071 death certificates in which diabetes was listed as the underlying cause of death.” Diabetes was discovered in 1889, later on various types of diabetes were identified and classified based on the symptoms experienced by patients, as time progressed severe side effects kicked in and that is when scientist started developing a treatment and awareness of diabetes. As the years progress, the numbers of deaths are increasing significantly due to the unawareness of such life-threatening disease.
Diabetes, occurs when your blood glucose levels are too high. Glucose is consumed through food. Insulin is a hormone, it serves to help glucose get into the cells in our body to provide energy. However, with diabetes type 1, the body fails to make insulin, but with type 2, the body cannot make or use insulin well.
The discovery of diabetes began in 1889, when through an experiment Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski found that when a dog’s pancreas was removed they displayed various symptoms of diabetes and then died soon after. A few years after, 1910, Sir Edward
Albert Sharpey-Schafer studied pancreas, and discovered that insulin would only be produced by non-diabetics. In 1921, Frederick Banting and Charles Best extracted insulin from a dog's pancreas and inject it into a dog with no pancreas, to their surprise, the dog’s blood sugar levels decrease. Therefore, in 1923 the commercial production of insulin for humans was introduced by Eli Lilly and Company. As the years progress new, faster acting treatments are introduced into the market such as sulfonylureas, glucagon, “intensive insulin therapy,” metformin, precose, lispro, byetta, pramlintide, JANUVIA,