Diabetes and Weight Loss

Diabetes has become one of the most common health problems that our genre is facing. This is true especially in Asian countries like India. So is this a problem that has found significance lately or was it present even in antiquity? Let us go through a brief history of when diabetes was identified and when the cause for this disease was found.

The first ever record of diabetes was given by a physician by the name of Hesy-Ra in 1552 B.C. In his record he mentions polyuria or frequent urination as a symptom of diabetes.

In 1st century A.D., Arateus described diabetes as "the melting down of flesh and limbs into urine." Up to the 11th century, diabetes was commonly diagnosed by what were called 'water tasters'. These 'water tasters' would taste the urine of people suspected with diabetes and thought that the urine of people who were diabetics tasted sweet. And hence the Latin word 'mellitus' meaning honey was added to the term diabetes. Later in the early 19th century, the first ever chemical tests were developed to indicate and measure the presence of sugar in urine.

But, the most significant discovery is credited to Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski who realized the role of pancreas in the causes of diabetes. This discovery was the result of an experiment conducted by them in 1889. Their experiment consisted of removing the pancreas of a dog. In their observations they found the dog had developed all the symptoms of diabetes before it died. Later in 1910, Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Scafer suggested that a certain chemical produced by the pancreas could be deficient in people suffering from diabetes. He proposed to call this chemical 'insulin' which is derived from the Latin word insula or island referring to 'islets of Langerhans' in the pancreas which produces the insulin required.

Until 1921 the existence of insulin was not clarified. Sir Federick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best, in 1921, repeated the experiment of Von Mering and Minkowski. But this time they went a step ahead by showing that the diabetic dog could be cured by giving it an extract secreted by the islets of Langerhans of another healthy dog. Banting, Best and their other collegues (especially chemist Collip) were able to find an effective treatment -insulin injections - by purifying insuline from bovine pancreas at the University of Toronto. Hence, the first patient was treated in 1922. Banting and Beat kept the patent free and made no attempt to control commercial production. As a result, Insulin production and therapy spread around the world.

The distinction between type1 and 2 diabetes was clearly mentioned by Sir Harold Percival Himsworth in 1936. Also in the 1940s, the first link between the damage caused to eyes and kidneys by diabetes in the long term was discovered. In 1955, oral drugs to lower sugar levels in the blood were introduced. Despite all these discoveries and inventions in the medical field, the fact that diabetes is a major cause of death in many places of the world remains the truth.