Patient's Education For Diabetes:

1. What treatments work for diabetes?
2. Key points about treating diabetes
3. Treatments for diabetes
4. Curing or preventing diabetes

What treatments work for diabetes?

There's no cure for diabetes. But there are treatments that can help you lead as normal and as healthy a life as possible. To do this, you need to keep the amount of glucose in your blood as close to normal as possible. If your blood glucose gets too high or too low, you may become ill.

Keeping your blood glucose level as close to normal as possible can prevent some of the extra problems (complications) linked with diabetes. It may also stop some complications from getting worse. The most common complications are eye problems, kidney problems, nerve damage and heart disease.

Key points about treating diabetes

• The best way to treat diabetes is to keep your blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible at all times. This is called tight control. It will help you stay healthy and avoid extra problems with your eyes, kidneys or nerves.
• To keep your glucose levels under tight control you need to watch what you eat and exercise regularly.
• If you have type 1 diabetes you may need to have insulin injections at least three times a day. Or you may use a continuous insulin pump. You may also need to measure your blood glucose levels at least four times a day and adjust your insulin if you need to.
• If you have type 2 diabetes you may be able to stay well just by watching what you eat and exercising. But you will probably have to take diabetes tablets, or to take insulin if the pills don't work, at some point. You or your doctor also need to measure your levels of glucose regularly.
• Keeping your glucose under tight control can have a side effect. You run the risk of your blood glucose getting too low (hypoglycaemia). This can cause dizziness and confusion and may lead to a medical emergency. So not everyone can use tight control as a treatment.
• You will need to have regular blood tests to check that your treatment is working and that your diabetes is under control.

Which treatments work best? Usually we look at all the different treatments for a condition and carefully weigh up the research, so that we can tell you which ones work best. But we haven't been able to do this for diabetes because the research hasn't been done. We don't know whether one tablet is better than another for treating type 2 diabetes or if one type of insulin is better than another at helping you stay healthy. But we have looked at the research on the treatment called tight control. This means keeping a close watch on your blood glucose levels and keeping them as close to normal as possible. We have ranked this as a treatment that works.

Curing or preventing diabetes

Scientists are looking at ways to cure type 1 diabetes by transplanting healthy cells that can make insulin into people with diabetes. This may work in the short term but we need more research to know if it will be a useful treatment over the long term.

It may be possible to prevent type 1 diabetes. Some treatments have worked in animals, but they may not work in people. And in the future, people at risk of getting diabetes might be able to be vaccinated with insulin to stop them getting the disease. The vaccine could stop people's immune systems attacking their own pancreas cells.