What is it about the body’s use of sugar that causes diabetes patients to have so many varied complications?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.