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How Does Stress Affect Diabetes

Diabetes

How does stress affect diabetes? How does stress affect people suffering from Diabetes ? The body will adjust to stress in small doses. It's when you're suffering from chronic stress over prolonged periods that you may have problems with either of two types of diabetes mellitus.

Juvenile Diabetes

The first, Type 1 is insulin-dependent. Here, the immune system decides that the cells in the pancreas which secrete insulin are, in fact, foreign invaders and attacks them. This leaves you with very little ability to secrete insulin and to promote the uptake of glucose into target cells.Cells therefore starve which can result in big trouble. Apart from having a bunch of glucose and fatty acids in your bloodstream with no place to go, they end up gumming up your blood vessels in your kidneys, thus making it harder for your organs to their job.

They form atherosclerotic plaques in arteries and make it impossible for oxygen and glucose to be transported to the tissues that depend on those blood vessels, causing minor strokes in those tissues, and often chronic pain. What's even more alarming, is that they also link proteins together in the eyes to make cataracts.

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The best way to manage insulin-dependent diabetes is to accommodate that dependence with insulin injections. A diabetic never wants their insulin levels to get too low because cells are deprived of energy and circulating glucose levels get too high.

You also don't want to take too much insulin because this deprives the brain of energy, potentially damaging neurons. This is a major task for any diabetic to maintain metabolic control by keeping food intake and insulin dosages just right with respect to fatigue and activity levels so as to increase life expectancy.

Adult-Onset Diabetes

The second, Type 2 is non-insulin-dependent. Here the trouble is not too little insulin, but the failure of the cells to respond to insulin. The problems arise with the tendency of many people to put on weight as they age.

People who don't put on weight as they age show no increase in the risk of this disease. This is prevalent in non-western populations. So the disease is not a normal feature of aging. Instead it's a disease of inactivity and fat surplus which happen to be much more common with age in many westernized populations.As you age, your fat cells eventually get full. By the time you're an adolescent the number of fat cells you have is fixed, so if you put on weight, the individual fat cells get gloated. Try eating another heavy meal, your body bursts with insulin trying to promote more fat storage by the fat cells but there isn't any more room left to store so the insulin receptors become desensitized.

The cells don't starve at this point. They've got enough fat stored in them. The cells end up getting into trouble because of all the glucose and fatty acids circulating in the bloodstream damaging kidneys, blood vessels and eyes. Here the 'glomming' is the problem.

How Does Chronic Stress Affect This Process?

How does stress affect diabetes? Firstly, the hormones of the stress response cause even more glucose and fatty acids to be mobilized into the bloodstream. This increases the risk of these gummimg up in the wrong places in both Type 1 and 2. Actually, chronic elevation of blood sugar levels even increases the likelihood of vascular damage in non-diabetics.

Secondly, not only does it make sense for the body to block insulin secretion, the brain doesn't trust the pancreas not to still secrete a little insulin. So glucocorticoids, epinephrine and norepinephrine act on fat fat cells throughout the body to make them even more less sensitive to insulin. Stress promotes insulin resistance.

This is bad for someone with insulin-dependent diabetes diabetes because once you throw some chronic stress into their balanced healthy diet and a good sensitivity as to when insulin is needed, then suddenly the insulin doesn't work quite as well. This causes them to feel terrible until they figure out that they need to inject more insulin, making cells more resistant, thus spiraling the insulin requirements upward until the stress period is over.

The perfectly balanced system is completely turned up end because different parts of the body regain their insulin sensitivity at different rates. This causes havoc with metabolic control in an insulin dependent diabetic.

Where's the Danger

How does stress affect diabetes? Suppose you're in your sixties, overweight and just on the edge of insulin resistance. You go through a period of chronic stress where your stress hormones telling your cells to be insulin resistant. If you go through enough of this, then you cross the threshold of being overtly diabetic and could suffer further atherosclerotic trouble.

Some people even have a genetic predisposition to insulin-resistant diabetes. They have some sort of metabolic vulnerability, such that stress disrupts their metabolism to an atypical extent long before they've become diabetic.

Insulin-dependent diabetes is devastating. It is nearly epidemic in the United States afflicting more than 15% of people over 65 years of age. The disease more than doubles mortality, and more than triples the rate of heart disease in men. It is the leading cause of blindness, and the seventh leading cause of death. The impact of stress is major when stress is prolonged.

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