When was diabetes discovered

Something truly miraculous. With this murky concoction, Banting and Best kept another dog with severe diabetes alive for 70 days—the dog died only when there was no more extract. With this success, the researchers, along with the help of colleagues J. Collip and John Macleod, went a step further. A more refined and pure form of insulin was developed, this time from the pancreases of cattle.

In January , Leonard Thompson, a year-old boy dying from diabetes in a Toronto hospital, became the first person to receive an injection of insulin.

The news about insulin spread around the world like wildfire. In time, Greek physicians also distinguished between diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus.

Diabetes insipidus has no link with diabetes mellitus. Diabetes insipidus results from a problem with a hormone called vasopressin that the pituitary gland produces. The ancient Roman doctor Galen mentioned diabetes but noted that he had only ever seen two people with it, which suggests that it was relatively rare in those days.

By the fifth century C. They noted that type 2 diabetes was more common in heavy, wealthy people than in other people. At that time, this might have implied that these individuals ate more than other people and were less active. Nowadays, the ready supply of processed food has weakened the association between wealth and eating more, but obesity , diet, and a lack of exercise are still risk factors for type 2 diabetes. In the Middle Ages, people believed that diabetes was a disease of the kidneys, but an English doctor in the late 18th century found that it occurred in people who had experienced an injury to the pancreas.

In , Matthew Dobson confirmed that the urine of people with diabetes could have a sweet taste. According to an article that the journal Medical Observations and Enquiries published, he measured the glucose in urine and found that it was high in people with diabetes. Dobson also noted that diabetes could be fatal in some people but chronic in others, further clarifying the differences between type 1 and type 2.

By the early 19th century, there were no statistics about how common diabetes was, there was no effective treatment, and people usually died within weeks to months of first showing symptoms. The early Greek physicians recommended treating diabetes with exercise, if possible, on horseback. They believed that this activity would reduce the need for excessive urination. Other treatment options have included :.

One doctor recommended a diet consisting of 65 percent fat, 32 percent protein, and 3 percent carbohydrate. However, he advised avoiding fruits and garden produce. Various experts have also recommended several chemicals and drugs, including ammonium sulfide, digitalis, magnesia, chalk, lithium salts, and potassium salts.

Doctors did not always agree on which diet or drugs to use as a treatment. Some also recommended lifestyle measures, such as:. These ways of managing diabetes did not prove particularly effective, and people with this condition experienced severe health problems. In , Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski found that removing the pancreas from dogs led them to develop diabetes and die shortly afterward.

This discovery helped scientists understand the role of the pancreas in regulating blood sugar levels.

In , Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer proposed that diabetes developed when there was a lack of a particular chemical that the pancreas produced. He called it insulin, meaning island, because the cells in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas produce it. In , Frederick Banting and Charles Best introduced an extract of pancreatic islet cells from healthy dogs into dogs with diabetes.

Doing this reversed diabetes and marked the discovery of the hormone insulin. They worked with two other scientists to purify insulin that they took from the pancreas of cows and produce the first treatment for diabetes. In January , year-old Leonard Thompson was the first person to receive an injection of insulin to treat diabetes. Thompson lived another 13 years with the condition and eventually died of pneumonia. In , Sir Harold Percival Himsworth published research that differentiated between type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

He theorized that many people had insulin resistance rather than insulin deficiency. The development of urine strips made detecting sugar easier and simplified the process of managing blood sugar levels, the Mayo Clinic reports. Introduction of the single-use syringe allowed for faster and easier insulin therapy options. Large portable glucose meters were created in , and have since been reduced to the size of a hand-held calculator.

Portable glucose meters are a key tool in managing diabetes today. They allow you to monitor your blood sugar levels at home, at work, and anywhere else. Fairly simple to use, they produce accurate results.

Learn more about glucose meters. Today, these pumps are light and portable, allowing for comfortable wearing on a daily basis. As of , diabetes was the seventh-leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now that blood sugar can be tested at home, diabetes is more manageable than ever. Insulin remains the primary treatment for type 1 diabetes. Those with type 2 diabetes can reduce their risk of health complications through regular exercise, healthy diets, and other medications.

Is diabetes genetic? Indeed, type 2 diabetes has a strong genetic component. Learn more about the connection. To acknowledge this feature, in the word "mellitus," meaning honey, was added to the name "diabetes," meaning siphon. It wasn't until the s that scientists developed chemical tests to detect the presence of sugar in the urine.

As physicians learned more about diabetes, they began to understand how it could be managed. The first diabetes treatment involved prescribed exercise, often horseback riding, which was thought to relieve excessive urination.

In the s and s, physicians began to realize that dietary changes could help manage diabetes, and they advised their patients to do things like eat only the fat and meat of animals or consume large amounts of sugar.

During the Franco-Prussian War of the early s, the French physician Apollinaire Bouchardat noted that his diabetic patients' symptoms improved due to war-related food rationing, and he developed individualized diets as diabetes treatments. This led to the fad diets of the early s, which included the "oat-cure," "potato therapy," and the "starvation diet.

In , Boston scientist Elliott Joslin established himself as one of the world's leading diabetes experts by creating the textbook The Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus , which reported that a fasting diet combined with regular exercise could significantly reduce the risk of death in diabetes patients.