Defining Diabetes Terms
  • Diabetes mellitus
    • The word diabetes means urine, and the word mellitus means sweet. Diabetes is a condition in which the patient urinates frequently due to a buildup of solutes in their blood. Diabetes mellitus (which has two forms--Type 1 and Type 2)  is a condition which causes the patient to urinate frequently, but the urine is sweet  because the solute present is glucose that did not get broken down in the blood. This happens because of either a resistance to or the absence of insulin in the blood.
  • Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes (mellitus)
    • Type 1 Diabetes occurs when the patient produces either ineffective insulin or none at all. This condition is generally hereditary and is developed from a young age. Therefore it is often referred to as juvenile-onset diabetes.
    • Type 2 Diabetes occurs when the patient's immune system develops a resistance to its own insulin. Therefore, the insulin is present but is not used. The resistance often happens as a result to an overexposure to glucose in the diet (i.e., overeating that often times leads to obesity) over time. Type 2 Diabetes is usually developed by adults (hence "adult-onset"), but with the increasingly sedentary, food-centered lifestyle that Americans have become accustomed to, it is now being developed by children as young as age five.
  • Insulin
    • A chemical produced by the pancreas that is necessary to break down glucose in the blood.
  • Prevalence and Incidence
    • Prevalence refers to the total number of people who have a disease.
    • Incidence refers to how many new cases of a disease are reported in a certain time period (for example, in one year).
  • Correlation
    • A statistical relationship between two variables (e.g., between the prevalence of diabetes and obesity). A correlation is measured as .
    • -1<R²<0 (negative correlation) OR 0<R²<1 (positive correlation)
    •  The closer R² is to | 1 |, the stronger the correlation.