[이슈밸리=칼럼] The vehicle’s energy source is gasoline. Cars run on petrol.
However, if you say that this gasoline is important for the car to move, spray it on the steering wheel and put it on the passenger seat, not only will it not help the car move, but it will also cause a fire hazard and smell bad.
Gasoline doesn’t help the car, it causes it to break. Gasoline needs to go into the engine to do its job. Gasoline in places other than the engine is not only a source of energy, but also causes damage to the car.
Blood sugar is just that. In the last article, I said that I would tell you what kind of problem the high blood sugar in the blood is that is not utilized by the cells, and why you should try to lower the blood sugar.
The reason is that, as I mentioned in the parable above, blood sugar that has not gone where it should be is not only not an energy source, but also poisons the blood vessels. It is not just a pity that it cannot be used as an energy source, but it is said that excessively high blood sugar in the blood due to not being used plays a role in damaging blood vessels.
Now you can understand why diabetics are trying to lower their blood sugar somehow. Many people know that high blood sugar means diabetes, but few people can explain why it doesn’t happen when blood sugar is high. From now on, what’s the problem if someone has high blood sugar to you? If you ask, you can answer that it’s a problem because that blood sugar is quietly destroying your blood vessels.
To summarize what has been said so far, diabetes can be summarized as a disease in which blood sugar is not used in cells due to problems such as insulin resistance and remains high in the blood, damaging blood vessels.
As I said, diabetes is a disease that ultimately destroys blood vessels, so you can see it as a disease that destroys everything except where there are no blood vessels in our body. In particular, organs in the body with concentrated thin blood vessels that are easily clogged are severely damaged over a long period of time. The representative organs are the eyes and kidneys, which are a collection of thin blood vessels. These complications are called ‘microvascular complications’.
In addition, even if it is not a thin blood vessel, if the blood vessel of a medium or larger size in an important body organ is damaged by diabetes, the damage is much more serious, so the complications of these blood vessels can be said to be of high importance. The most important organs in our body are the heart and brain. So, the complications that damage the blood vessels of the heart and brain due to diabetes are specially distinguished and named. This is referred to as ‘macrovascular complications’.
In addition, there is a body that requires special attention because microvascular and macrovascular complications affect the body at the same time. It’s the feet. If you see a patient whose feet are broken due to diabetes more than other diabetic complications, the shock will not be small.
I still vividly remember the smell I smelled when I opened the affected area to dress a person who had an ulcer on her foot due to diabetes for the first time during my internship. This complication of foot damage caused by diabetes is called ‘diabetic foot disease’.
In this way, complications of diabetes can be categorized into ‘microvascular complications’, ‘macrovascular complications’ and ‘diabetic foot disease’. We will explain this one by one in the future.
