In Poland, almost 3 million people suffer from diabetes, while it is suspected that 600. people have it undetected yet. The prognosis is still disturbing, and the disease is one of the greatest medical challenges. It is an important risk factor for heart attack, stroke, blindness, kidney failure and even limb amputation. Swedish scientists propose a new classification of this disease. They say there are five types of diabetes, not two as is commonly believed. They write about it in the latest issue of the journal “The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology”.
According to the classic definition, diabetes has two faces: one is type 1, i.e. juvenile diabetes, because it usually appears at a young age, also known as insulin-dependent diabetes (requires taking insulin).
The second type is adult diabetes (or type 2) – although this division seemed to be outdated before, because this type of diabetes is more and more common also in children and adolescents (due to increasing obesity among them).
The specialists of the Diabetes Center of the University of Lund in Sweden and the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Finland, after analyzing almost 15 thousand. cases of diabetes now argue in the pages of the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology that this disease has five varieties.
New types of diabetes
Type 1 diabetes
The first type is autoimmune diabetes, where the patient’s immune system destroys the cells in the body that produce insulin. It usually occurs in young people and corresponds to the so-called juvenile, insulin-dependent diabetes.
Type 2 diabetes
The second type is also juvenile diabetes, requiring the use of insulin, and occurs in people with a normal body weight. However, it is not related to the autoimmune effect of one’s own immune system. However, the effect is the same: the cells of the pancreas are unable to produce insulin.
Type 3 diabetes
The third type of diabetes is associated with obesity, which can occur in adults as well as in children and adolescents. It causes resistance to insulin, which is produced in increasing amounts with little effect until the body can no longer produce it.
Type 4 diabetes
The fourth type of diabetes is also associated with obesity, but to a lesser degree. In addition, it can occur in people whose metabolism is similar to that of people with a normal body weight.
Type 5 diabetes
The fifth type of diabetes is age-related because it appears in people older than the other forms of the disease. In such patients, the disease is more likely to be milder, which means, for example, that it can only be controlled with medication and may not require insulin.
One of the authors of the study, Prof. Leif Groop from Lund University said in a statement for BBC News that this division of diabetes better meets the requirements of the so-called personal medicine and allows you to better tailor the treatment to a specific patient. The first three types of new diabetes mellitus should be treated more aggressively to better balance blood glucose levels.
Different types of diabetes may have different complications. With type 2, the risk of blindness is higher, and with type 3, chronic renal failure is more common.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 1980 there were 108 million people with diabetes in the world, and in 2014 their number increased to 422 million. In Europe, already 60 million people suffer from diabetes, or 9,2 percent. population. 2,9 million people are sick in Poland.