I don’t produce enough lactase and so I need to supplement with a pill when I eat dairy. However, that’s where it stops. Yet, with diabetes patients, there are so many complications. Also, sorry for the misleading nature of my previous post.
In: 2
Well your entire nutrition isn’t based on lactose-based aliments so you don’t need to worry about being supplemented in lactase constantly to not die.
In diabetes, my guess is you’re talking about type 1, you don’t produce insulin or very little and you cannot process glucose. Glucose is the principal source of energy of your body, and it comes from sugar, If glucose accumulates in your blood vessels for too long, it fucks them up and can leads to severe vascular problem ranging from kidney disease ot having a stroke.
One might say “well, no prob, then you just need to take insulin right ?”. Injecting insulin indeed allows you to process sugar normally and not have a constant hyperglycemia (too much sugar in the blood) but the problem is that insulin is secretion is very much finely tuned by your body when you don’ thave diabetes, you cannot modulate this fine tunning with insulin injection : you just inject a certain amount of insulin that is needed, it’s not perfect but it’s far better than dying.
The insulin pump is as close as we get to this fine level of regulation but it’s still not as good as the body own regulation : your body insulin levels are regulated depending on what you eat, certains level of hormones, physical exercise, emotions, hydration and I could go on. The pump is “only” programmed to deliver insulin continuously to simulate a normal basal level of insulin and to deliver a significant amount during meals so you can process food.
Problem tho is that it’s still not a perfect regulation. So you will have two problems
1 : You might still end up in hyperglycemia sometimes and you increase yoru risk of cardiovascular disease
2 : With time and age it’s not uncommon to become resistant to insulin, that’s why type 2 diabetes appear mostly in people over 45 years old. When you’re type 1 diabetes since you may inject more insulin than needed because you cannot get a perfect bodily regulation of insulin, you can develop this resistance much sooner.
How it can affect the eyes:
Elevated glucose levels will lead to inflammation or blockages within the cardiovascular system. Essentially the tiny little vessels such as in the eyes, become blocked or swell or bulge. This can lead to retinopathy, which in turn can lead to proliferative retinopathy, whereby the body grows new vessels to try and return blood blow to the retina.
But new vessels are inferior and brittle, and instead leak and lift away membrane layers of the eye.
So you end up with things like detached retina.
As for nefropathy (kidneys) and neuropathy (loss of feeling in extremities), i suspect it is a similar affair.
Though i specifically work in Diabetic Retinopathy (eyes)
These 2 conditions are not even remotely comparable. Lactose is a specific type of sugar that you are not able to process. So it runs through you, and upsets your digestion. Glucose is the base sugar and energy source of your body, so when people can’t process it, it means the cells in their body won’t have an energy source.
Many of the complications of diabetes are based on how high sugar in the blood effects the vascular system. It basically causes fatty deposits to build up in the veins, slowly clogging and stiffening them. When blood can’t be easily delivered to parts of the body, sch as the feet, the nerves and cells start to die. They loose sensation, and injuries can’t heal properly. That is why many diabetics have amputated feet and such, after living with diabetes for a long time.
When the body can’t make insulin to process the sugar, it makes the liver work overtime to break down fat, for energy. That is why diabetes was a death sentence before we learned how to make insulin. People would just starve to death, no matter how much they ate. That process would also cause something called Diabetic ketoacidosis, so your blood would get more and more acidic which causes many problems of it’s own.
One of the problems is that too much sugar makes the blood thick. That causes all the problems like strokes, and the kind of poor circulation that leads to amputations.
Thick blood is also linked to cognitive decline (dementia etc.) and so many other bad things.
There are probably other issues linked to sugar metabolism, but I don’t know about those.
It’s not really about the use of sugar.
The body has a very powerful system to keep blood glucose levels properly regulated within a small range.
Diabetes is characterized by elevated blood glucose levels, both after meals and when fasting – it’s a breakdown of the regulation system.
The mechanisms of damage are a bit too complicated for ELI5, but one of the mechanisms at work is that too much blood glucose damages the inside of blood vessels. That is why diabetes raises the risk of heart disease and neuropathy (nerve damage) due to the damage of small blood vessels.
Latest Answers