Miftahul Jannah, Kaulah Juara “Bela Diri” Sesungguhnya!
Your brain is sensitive to the quantity of glucose it receives as fuel. Both high blood glucose and low blood glucose levels are likely to adversely affect your ability to think and reason. High blood glucose damages your brain Type 2 diabetes can damage the tiny blood vessels in your eyes, causing loss of vision, even blindness. The disease can also damage the nerves in your feet, making walking painful with a high degree of risk that you may need an amputation of the foot or leg. These consequences of diabetes are well known. But what is not so well known is that diabetes can also damage the tiny blood vessels in your brain. This damage affects your brains white matter. White matter is that part of the brain where the nerves communicate with each other. If your nerves cannot communicate with each other or are otherwise damaged you will experience vascular cognitive impairment or vascular dementia. Vascular cognitive impairment is a decline in thinking abilities caused by disease that damages the brain's blood vessels. Vascular dementia is a common form of dementia caused by a reduced supply of blood to the brain, which can have various causes. Both types of dementia can be caused by both types of diabetes. Statistics, however, suggest that people with type 1 diabetes are less likely to experience dementia if their glucose levels are well controlled. The problem for type 2 diabetes is that the disease is usually just one of a cluster of disorders, high blood glucose levels, excessively high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels or excess body fat around the waist, known as metabolic syndrome. In fact, if you have type 2 diabetes there is an 85% chance that you also have metabolic syndrome. And just like diabetes, excessive blood pressure and abnormal cholesterol levels also damage your blood vessels. This combination of risks of damage to your blood vessels means that keeping your blood glucose levels under control is vital for diabetics. While vascular disease can cause cognitive impairment, it can also contribute to impairments in thinking and behaviour in a person with other brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. Diabetes and Alzheimer's disease Statistics indicate that people with type 2 diabetes are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease compared to people without diabetes. But does diabetes actually cause Alzheimer's? The answer is not known. One of the characteristics of Alzheimer's disease is the accumulation of deposits of an abnormal protein, beta-amyloid, in the brain. In some people with the disease, this protein forms clumps that interfere with the ability of nerve cells to communicate with each other. In the pancreas, where insulin is made, similar proteins result in damage to, and the death of, cells. Thus, rather than diabetes causing Alzheimer's it would seem that whatever goes wrong in both of them is very similar, ie there is a shared risk, something that can cause diabetes and/or Alzheimer's. But so far research has not uncovered what that something is. Vascular cognitive impairment (the result of diabetes rather than diabetes itself) could be another possible cause of Alzheimer's disease. Whether this is true or not is still to be determined. Current knowledge of how Alzheimer's disease and diabetes are connected is hazy and uncertain. Focused research is needed to determine which happens first, whether one is causing the other and how exactly they are linked. Low blood glucose and the brain Those of us diabetics who are controlling our blood glucose levels satisfactorily have probably inadvertently experienced blood glucose levels that have dropped too low. The symptoms are easy to recognise: headache dizziness difficulty in thinking poor coordination trouble walking or talking Severely low blood sugar can affect your mood, give you seizures or convulsions, make you pass out or put you in a coma. If you only occasionally go too low there is unlikely to be an adverse long-term effect on your brain. However, if you have frequent bouts of low blood glucose, you can become unaware of it, a condition known as hypoglycaemia unawareness. With hypoglycaemia unawareness, you do not experience the usual early symptoms of low glucose levels, nausea, hunger, shakiness, cold or clammy skin, and/or a pounding heart, which, if you were asleep, would be enough to wake you up. In other words, with hypoglycaemia unawareness, your blood glucose can continue to drop until it goes so low that you lapse into a coma. This unawareness of what is happening to you glucose level can catch you when you least suspect it; eg, when you are driving or walking, causing an accident or a fall. Another question concerning hypoglycaemia unawareness is whether repeated bouts of low glucose can cause long-term memory problems or raise the risk of dementia. The answer is far from clear. One large study, the Diabetes Control & Complications Trial, indicated that low blood glucose in persons with type 1 diabetes does not have a long-term impact on memory or the ability to think. But another study suggests that, in older people with type 2 diabetes, there is a link between severe low blood glucose levels and a higher risk of dementia. As you can see, diabetes definitely can damage your brain but how it does so is not at all clear. But what is clear is that diabetics need to control their blood glucose levels fastidiously, ensuring that they seldom (if ever) go too high or too low. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9320285
