(light music) - Diabetes is very common, it affects about 37 million US citizens, and 1/4 of those don't know they have it.

Hello, my name is Dr. Sands, I'm the medical director for Nashville Healthcare Center of Bordeaux.

On today's "For Your Good Health," we give you a general overview of diabetes.

After years of research, we still don't know exactly what causes diabetes.

Diabetes is when your body has difficulty making or using insulin to unlock its ability to process sugar as energy in your cells.

There are multiple types, most common is diabetes type two.

There's also type one that we mentioned is autoimmune related.

There's gestational diabetes that only occurs during pregnancy, and there's a type of type one that starts late in adulthood as well.

Type one diabetes is the body's inability to make insulin and type two is tied to insulin resistance where the insulin doesn't bind properly and doesn't function well.

There are several risk factors for diabetes, family history is very important.

Also, your ethnicity is higher in African Americans, Hispanic, and Native Americans.

Also, it depends on if you're overweight with a BMI over 25, if you live a sedentary lifestyle, and maybe don't exercise enough, but also you can have predisposing conditions like PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, or pancreatic destruction can also lead to diabetes.

Some of the symptoms of a high blood sugar which can give you a clue that you may have diabetes, include the polys, the polyuria where you are peeing a lot more frequently than usual, the polydipsia where you're more thirsty than usual, and the polyphagia where you're eating more than usual.

Unfortunately, there's not a cure for diabetes, however, we can control it to the point where patients can reach remission.

By remission, we mean that the blood sugars become very close to normal blood sugars like people without diabetes, and the A1C is less than 5.7.

The most common medication is metformin.

Metformin tricks the liver to stop making glucose itself and it also improves the insulin resistance.

Insulin is a synthetic hormone that's similar to what the body makes, and it helps to, again, unlock that potential to utilize sugar as energy in the cells.

Diet and exercise is extremely important.

It helps medications be more effective.

It helps you to reach your blood sugar levels.

Good news is diabetes can be managed well and you can have a good outcome under the care of your doctor.

I hope this information has been helpful.

Thank you for watching.

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