Today it is possible to tailor insulin therapy and thus have an optimal quality of life, without major limitations, and above all a life expectancy similar to that of a healthy person.
Often the diagnosis comes from very young, as in the case of the son of former footballer Massimo Ambrosini, or in childhood or adolescence: for this, but also because a chronic disease which imposes a daily cure based on insulin injections, the
type 1 diabetes a disease that greatly affects the collective imagination. Luckily for her therapy options there are many and today the quality and life expectancy of people with type 1 diabetes are similar to that of those who do not suffer from this metabolic disease.
Type 1 diabetes symptoms
In type 1 diabetes the immune system goes crazy and attacks the beta cells of the pancreas which produce insulin, the hormone essential for the management of sugar metabolism in the body, destroying them: therefore it is an autoimmune disease to which they contribute genetic factorsbecause having close family members with type 1 diabetes increases the likelihood, and environmental, because for example some viral infections can contribute to triggering the altered immune response. Insulin deficiency soon manifests itself with symptoms such as weight loss, tiredness, excessive thirst and increased urine output; unfortunately it still happens that these symptoms are not given enough weight and the diagnosis is made when the child or adolescent arrives in the emergency room with a serious metabolic imbalance. However, type 1 diabetes can also develop after adolescence: 10-20 percent of cases appear later and are called LADA, or Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults.
How to cure today
Until one hundred years ago, having type 1 diabetes was a sentence, then after the discovery of insulin, slowly the life of patients changed because it was possible to make up for the hormone deficiency through daily injections. It is not simple, because it is necessary dose insulin according to diet and physical exercisebut in recent decades the management of the disease has greatly improved, first thanks to the arrival of rapid insulins to be administered with three meals and slow insulins which allowed the management of basal blood sugar, then thanks to long-acting insulin which works for 24 hours and reduced the risk of nocturnal hypoglycemiaone of the most fearsome complications because it can lead to coma. Recently they have also arrived ultra-rapid insulins which can be administered during the meal and have an action within a few minutes, or ultra-prolonged which free from the constraint of the evening injection at the same time. In short, today it is possible to tailor therapy to the individual person, meeting their life needs and with an optimal ability to manage blood sugar.
Monitoring: new technologies
Even blood glucose monitoring, necessary to modulate hormone injections, is now much simpler: from the strips and lancing device of the past we arrived at sensors which can be applied to the skin or even subcutaneously, which last up to several weeks and monitor blood glucose practically continuously, recording the values every five minutes. The result is an unprecedented level of blood sugar control, which improves disease management reducing the risk of complications but without changing the patients’ quality of life. If you add to this the ability to use i
insulin pumps
perhaps connected to the sensors and with algorithms able to decide insulin dose in response to readings with little or no patient intervention, in what is getting ever closer to a full-blown
artificial pancreas
we realize that the objective, not too distant, is to make type 1 diabetes a pathology that we almost do not notice: the days of a person with diabetes are almost comparable to those of those who do not have blood sugar problems, the permitted activities have no boundaries (there are professional sportsmen with diabetes in all disciplines, for example, and their athletic feats of all kinds are now countless) and above all life expectancy today comparable to those of the general population.
March 3, 2023 (change March 3, 2023 | 2:32 pm)
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