How many treatments are there for diabetes?

Diabetes can generally be divided into two categories, one needs insulin treatment, and the other can be treated by drugs (oral hypoglycemic drugs) or by diet. Teenagers with diabetes often (but not necessarily) need insulin treatment, while diabetics after 40 years old often don't need insulin treatment.

Scientific researchers have gradually figured out that a very small number of young diabetics who do not depend on insulin are similar to those who do not depend on insulin after 40 years old. This type of diabetes is considered to have genetic factors. There is the best data to prove this very important conclusion. Generally speaking, if one parent has this kind of diabetes, every child has a 50% risk of developing this disease. This is a dominant genetic disease, and this patient has few complications even if he has been ill for decades. This means that this kind of diabetes is very different from adolescent insulin-dependent diabetes. The latter is characterized by serious complications. If a person's father or mother has diabetes since childhood and needs continuous insulin supply, the risk of developing diabetes is much smaller, only about 1 1%.

If both parents have diabetes, the risk of children suffering from diabetes depends on what kind of diabetes their parents have. Because there is no data, we can't give a reliable opinion on the situation of insulin-dependent diabetes whose parents are teenagers. There is not a lot of data to show how much insulin-independent diabetes will affect children whose parents have puberty. According to statistics, about two-thirds of these parents have diabetes.

To sum up, some causes of diabetes are directly inherited, some are the interaction between genes and environment, and some are completely acquired, such as surgical resection of pancreas or some serious infections. Although we need to study diabetes further, the influence of genes is obvious.