The Name Game
Diabetes is the Greek word for “siphon” (since people with the disease tend to urinate copiously). Mellitus is Latin for “honey” or “sweet,” a name added when physicians discovered that the urine from people with diabetes is sweet with glucose.
As researchers began to understand diabetes better, different subtypes of the disease were classified. Type 1 diabetes was once routinely called insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (or IDDM), and type 2 diabetes was called non insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM).
The problem with this classification scheme was that it defined diabetes not by the cause of the disease, but by its treatment — specifically whether or not a patient required insulin injections. This was often confusing because so-called non-insulin-dependant (type 2) patients do frequently require insulin therapy to achieve good control.
Fact
Long before the advent of diagnostic urine testing in the nineteenth century, one of the earliest ways physicians learned to make a diagnosis of diabetes was to taste a patient's urine. Sugar in the urine produces a sweet taste.
Types and Subtypes of Diabetes
Classification |
Includes These Clinical Subtypes |
Type 1 |
Type 1A LADA (latent autoimmune diabetes in adults) Idiopathic type 1B |
Type 2 |
N/A |
Gestational |
N/A |
Other types, caused by the following: |
Genetic beta cell defects (like MODY) Genetic insulin action defects Other genetic syndromes Diseases of or injury to the pancreas Other endocrine disorders Drugs or toxins |
Also confusing was the old-school system of calling type 1 diabetes juvenile diabetes and type 2 diabetes adult-onset diabetes. While most cases of type 1 diabetes are diagnosed in childhood and adolescence, adults of any age, from twenty-somethings to the elderly, can develop the disease. And in recent years, type 2 diabetes has begun to appear in younger adults, adolescents, and children as obesity rates soar in the United States. In short, there are no age limits to either type of diabetes.
In the late 1990s, both the American Diabetes Association and the World Health Organization recommended using the names type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes as the clinical standard to explain these very complex, similar, yet very different diseases. However, you may come across a few physicians, and many laypeople, who still use the old monikers.
