Diabetes: What is Type 3 and Type 4 all about?

Type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes should be familiar to many people.

But there are other forms of diabetes.

Regardless of whether diabetes type 1 or 2 *: Both metabolic disorders have the same consequence. The sugar metabolism does not work normally, which permanently increases the blood sugar level. The reasons for this: The body cannot produce the hormone insulin in sufficient quantities (type 1 diabetes, often congenital) or can no longer use it well (type 2 diabetes).

Type 2 diabetes is far more common and is usually triggered by an unhealthy lifestyle

. Little exercise and an unbalanced diet are among the greatest risk factors.

For example, 95 percent of the currently around eight million diabetes patients in Germany have type 2 diabetes, as the German Diabetes Aid informs. 

The starting point for type 2 diabetes is insulin resistance

.

As a result, the blood sugar level rises because the cells can absorb less sugar from food.

Diabetes must always be treated because a persistently high blood sugar level damages the blood vessels, which can lead to sensory disturbances such as tingling in the feet.

Organs like the kidney are also damaged. 

In the worst case, patients fall into a diabetic coma - with life-threatening consequences

.

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Those who have a very unbalanced diet and rarely exercise encourage the development of diabetes.

But there are other causes as well.

© Gemma Ferrando / Imago

Type 3 and 4 diabetes: when illness and pregnancy make you diabetic

When doctors speak of type 3 diabetes, it is a rare form of diabetes that cannot be classified as type 1 or 2. The group of type 3 diabetes includes very different diseases in which a diabetic metabolic situation occurs, as the German Diabetes Aid informs. These include, for example, a disease of the pancreas, Cushing's syndrome or inherited genetic defects in the beta cells. Corticosteroid therapy can also result in type 3 diabetes, it said.

In order to bring the blood sugar level back to a normal level, the treatment of the causative disease is in the foreground in type 3 diabetes.

Gestational diabetes is also known as type 4 diabetes or gestational diabetes (GDM). According to the German Diabetes Aid, at least 45,000 women develop it every year. “

GDM does not cause any complaints and can therefore easily be overlooked

“, Said Ute Schäfer-Graf, head of the Berlin Diabetes Center for Pregnant Women at the St. Joseph Hospital in Berlin-Tempelhof, in a press release by the German Diabetes Aid. Unrecognized and therefore untreated, GDM leads to birth problems five times more often than in unaffected mothers. As a result of the pregnant woman's high glucose level, the unborn child produces more insulin. The hormone also promotes growth. "Therefore, affected babies often have a high birth weight and have to be born by caesarean section," explains Professor Schäfer-Graf. "They also have a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes as adults." Lifestyle measures such as more exercise and a change in diet are often sufficient to lower the glucose levels of affected women, it said.

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List of rubric lists: © Gemma Ferrando via www.imago-images.de