Diabetes means that your blood glucose (GLOO-kos), also called blood sugar, is too high. Glucose comes from the food you eat and is needed to fuel our bodies. Glucose is also stored in our liver and muscles. Your blood always has some glucose in it because your body needs glucose for energy. But having too much glucose in your blood is not healthy.

Type 1 is the type of diabetes that people most often get before 30 years of age. All people with type 1 diabetes need to take insulin (IN-suh-lin) because their bodies do not make enough of it. Insulin helps turn food into energy for the body to work. Most people make insulin in their pancreas. If you have type 1 diabetes , your body does not make insulin. Insulin helps glucose from the foods you eat get to all parts of your body and be used for energy.

Healthy eating, exercise, and losing weight may help you lower your blood glucose (also called blood sugar) when you find out you have type 2 diabetes. If these treatments do not work, you may need one or more types of diabetes pills to lower your blood glucose. After a few more years, you may need to take insulin shots because your body is not making enough insulin.

Gestational (jes-TAY-shon-al) diabetes is a type of diabetes that occurs when women are pregnant. Having it raises their risk for getting diabetes, mostly type 2, for the rest of their lives. It also raises their child's risk for being overweight and for getting type 2 diabetes.

Some people with diabetes use complementary or alternative therapies to treat diabetes. Although some of these therapies may be effective, others can be ineffective or even harmful. Patients who use complementary and alternative medicine need to let their health care providers know what they are doing.

Financial Help for Diabetes Care

Medicare is a Government program providing health care services for people who a

January 28, 2010 – In people who put on a lot of weight, or whose bodies start developing the inability to use insulin effectively that leads toward type 2 diabetes, the pancreas typically ramps up its supply of insulin-generating “beta” cells—at least in part by replicating existing beta cells.

Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center and their colleagues now have identified a cell-cycle protein that is essential for beta-cell replication to respond successfully to insulin resistance. The finding may point toward eventual therapies for preventing or treating type 2 diabetes.

Biologists in the labs of Joslin Principal Investigator Rohit N. Kulkarni, M.D., Ph.D., and Anil Bhushan, Ph.D., at the University of California at Los Angeles used a genetic approach to show that a protein called cyclin D2 is needed for this beta-cell response in mice.

Cyclin D2 is a member of a small family of proteins that aid in the cell cycle, by which cells divide into two. Earlier studies had demonstrated that cyclin D2 is particularly important to the replication of beta cells but had not directly addressed its role in insulin resistance.

The researchers began with two existing mouse models that develop insulin resistance—one mild case and one more severe case, reflecting the spectrum observed in humans with type 2 diabetes. Each of the models ends up generating many more beta cells. When these mice were crossed with mice lacking cyclin D2, all their progeny developed diabetes because they produced dramatically fewer beta cells.

This work provides direct evidence in mice that cyclin D2 is needed for a successful response to a broad spectrum of insulin resistance, and may lead toward treatments for preventing and curing type 2 diabetes.

“Beta-cell replication occurs naturally in diet-induced obesity and in pregnancy, so this process gives us a target for therapy,” Dr. Kulkarni notes.

The research also holds implications for work in his lab and many other labs that seeks to create beta cells from induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, adult cells transformed to a state like that of embryonic stem cells.

“One could envision expanding beta cells created from IPS cells in vitro and then transplanting them,” Dr. Kulkarni says. “In that case, it will be extremely useful to identify proteins like cyclin D2 that are helpful for replication.”

Drs. Kulkarni and Bhushan are co-corresponding authors on a paper about the research that was published online in Diabetes on January 26.