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Essay on Diabetes Mellitus

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Diabetes mellitus is a collection of common metabolic disorders. The scenario of passing large amount of urine is described by the Greek and Roman physicians as diabetes whereas the term mellitus refers to sweet taste (Barrett, Barman, Boitano, & Brooks, 2012). The name of the disease reveals one of the important clinical manifestation, that is, passing sweet-tasted urine, and in the other word, the presence of sugar in the urine. Besides that, Funk (2010) stated that there are three most common symptoms in diabetes mellitus, which are polyuria (large volume of urine), polydipsia (excessive thrist), and polyphagia (excessive eating). Lecthuman et al. (2010) revealed that overall prevalence of diabetes mellitus in Malaysia, during year 2006 …show more content…

According to Abbas et al. (2010), there is evidence that environmental factors particularly viral infection can cause the trigger of Islet cell destruction in type 1 diabetes mellitus through three mechanisms. The first mechanism, virus may cause injury to islet and therefore promote release of B cell antigens and autoreactive T cells get activated. Second mechanism suggests that virus release protein that mimic B-cell antigens thus body immune response tend to counteract the self-tissue. The third possibility is that re-infection with the same virus from the early life shares antigenic epitopes and therefore causes activation of immune response. Study from Hviid, Stellfeld, Wohlfahrt, and Melbye (2004) revealed there is no causative connection between childhood and risk of developing type 1 diabetes. Next up is type 2 diabetes mellitus. Type 2 diabetes may result from insulin resistance and B-cell dysfunction. Insulin resistance is characterized by the inability of peripheral tissues to respond normally to the insulin in the body which then results in low uptake of glucose in muscle, decreased glycolysis and fatty acid oxidation and lastly the difficulty to lower down the hepatic gluconeogenesis (Abbas et al., 2010). According to Mcphee and Hammer (2010), insulin resistance is a key cause that link obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Kahn,

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