Diabetes is a disorder in which sugar is not used up in the body as it should be, but accumulates in the blood and is discharged in the urine. The causes are various. Over=work, overeating and lack of exercise combined seem an important cause in many cases; in others heredity, or disease of the pancreas (or sweet-bread) is the cause. The last cause is of interest as being discovered comparatively recently. Physiologists have shown us by experimental removal of the pancreas in animals that one function of the pancreas is to pour into the blood a secretion which regulates the nutrition of the body, the absence of which causes the sugar to be discharged in the urine.
Attention was thus directed to the pancreas in diabetes with the result that a certain variety of this diseasewas found to be associated with pancreatic disease.
The symptoms are thirst, the passage of an excess of urine, a voracious appetite and either loss of flesh or obesity.
The chief complications are carbuncle, consumption, and nervous symptoms, especially mental depression. The course of the disease varies; in childhood it is often rapidly fatal but in middle age it may last for years.
In the cases due to over-eating the chance of recovery is good. The treatment is chiefly dietetic. All sugar and farinaceous food requires reduction, and the amount of fluid drunk should equal the amount of fluid passed and no more.
Animal food, except oysters and liver, all sharp fruits like lemons, all vegetables that grow above ground, except peas and beans are suitable.
Thick soups, which are thickened with flour, are not allowable. Flour consists of starches and gluten, the former is not allowable but the latter is useful, hence as a substitute for bread, flour from which the starch has been removed is used and made into a bread known as gluten bread and almond bread. (It may now be obtained at Gallard's of Regent Street. The Protene Company also make a bread free of starch, which they prepare from milk and egg). If any ordinary bread is allowed, it is usually given in the form of toast.
As substitutes for sugar, glycerine and saccharine are used.
