Maybe a kid you know always eats a snack during a soccer game or goes to the
school nurse before lunch to get a shot.
If you have a friend or a classmate like this — or this sounds just like
you — you're not alone. Thousands of kids all over the world do stuff like
this every day because they have type 1 diabetes (say: dye-uh-BEE-tees).
What is it? Let's find out.
What Is Diabetes?

Diabetes is a disease that affects how the body uses glucose
(say: GLOO-kose), a sugar that is the body's main source of fuel. Your body needs
glucose to keep running. Here's how it should work:
- You eat.
- Glucose from the food gets into your bloodstream.
- Your pancreas makes a hormone
called insulin
(say: IN-suh-lin).
- Insulin helps the glucose get into the body's cells.
- Your body gets the energy it needs.
The pancreas
is a long, flat gland in your belly that helps your body digest food. It also makes
insulin. Insulin is kind of like a key that opens the doors to the cells of the body.
It lets the glucose in. Then the glucose can move out of the blood and into the cells.
But if someone has diabetes, the body either can't make insulin or the insulin
doesn't work in the body like it should. The glucose can't get into the cells normally,
so the blood sugar level gets too high. Lots of sugar in the blood makes people sick
if they don't get treatment.
What Is Type 1 Diabetes?
The two major types of diabetes are type 1 and type 2.
In type 1 diabetes (which used to be called insulin-dependent diabetes
or juvenile diabetes), the pancreas can't make insulin. The body
can still get glucose from food but the glucose can't get into the cells where it's
needed. Glucose stays in the blood, which makes the blood sugar level very high and
causes health problems.
To fix the problem, someone with type 1 diabetes needs to take insulin through
regular shots
or an insulin
pump.
Type 2 diabetes is
different from type 1 diabetes. In type 2 diabetes, the pancreas still makes insulin,
but the insulin doesn't work in the body like it should and blood sugar levels get
too high.
No one knows for sure what causes type 1 diabetes, but scientists think it has
something to do with genes.
Genes are like instructions for how the body should look and work that are passed
on by parents to their kids.
But just getting the genes for diabetes isn't usually enough. Something else has
to happen — like getting a viral infection — for a person to develop type
1 diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes can't be prevented. Doctors can't even tell who will get it and
who won't.