99 Fun Facts About Diabetes

The word 'diabetes' comes from a Greek word meaning what?

A passer-through or siphon: Greek physicians pictured drink running straight through the patient as if through a tube, and Aretaeus wrote that the body itself seemed to melt down into urine.

What did the English physician Thomas Willis report about his diabetic patients' urine in the 1670s?

It tasted sweet: Willis sampled his patients' urine himself, and the Latin word mellitus, 'honey-sweet', in the disease's full name records the same finding.

Which Egyptian manuscript from around 1500 BCE mentions 'too great emptying of the urine'?

It even recommends a drink to take for the condition.

Type 2 diabetes was formerly known by what name?

Adult-onset stopped fitting: type 2 is now increasingly diagnosed in children, as rates have climbed alongside obesity since 1960.

Which Oscar-winning actor announced on David Letterman's show in 2013 that he had type 2 diabetes?

Tom Hanks said his doctor told him he had 'graduated' after years of high blood sugar readings, and joked that getting back to his high-school weight to shed the diagnosis was beyond him.

For how much did insulin's discoverers sell their patent rights to their university?

One dollar: the discoverers wanted everyone who needed insulin to be able to afford it, and Banting at first refused to put his name on a patent at all.

Banting shared his 1923 Nobel money with Best after the prize went to Banting and whom?

John Macleod provided the laboratory; Banting, furious that Best was passed over, split his prize money with him, and Macleod in turn shared his half with James Collip.

Insulin pioneer Frederick Banting died in 1941 in what kind of wartime accident?

Plane crash: flying to Britain as a medical liaison officer, Banting survived the impact in Newfoundland after both engines failed, but died of his injuries the next day.

In which Canadian city did teenager Leonard Thompson receive the world's first insulin injection in January 1922?

Toronto: the first dose failed and raised an abscess, so James Collip spent twelve days purifying the extract before a second attempt that worked.

Which US Supreme Court justice has lived with type 1 diabetes since she was a child?

Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the diagnosis, then seen as a 'deadly curse', convinced her she 'couldn't afford to waste time', an urgency she says has stayed with her ever since.

The word 'insulin' comes from the Latin insula, meaning what?

Island: the hormone was named for the pancreas's islets, the clusters of cells that make it, more than a decade before anyone managed to isolate it.

Which German medical student discovered the pancreatic islets that bear his name in 1869?

Paul Langerhans described the cell clusters in his student thesis but had no idea what they did; they were named after him only in 1893, five years after his death.

Which cells in the pancreatic islets produce insulin?

Beta cells make the body's insulin, so when they are destroyed, as in type 1 diabetes, the hormone has to be injected for the rest of the person's life.

The hormone-making islets are only about 2 percent of the pancreas; what does the rest of the organ mainly produce?

Digestive enzymes: nearly all of the pancreas makes the juice that breaks down food in the gut, yet the tiny islets draw far more than their share of its blood supply.

The word 'pancreas' comes from Greek words meaning what?

All flesh: from pan, 'all', and kreas, 'flesh', probably because the organ is soft and uniform throughout; cooks still know an animal's pancreas as sweetbread.

Type 1 diabetes is what kind of condition?

An autoimmune disorder: the immune system attacks and destroys the pancreas's insulin-making cells, so people with type 1 must take insulin every day to stay alive.

Which scale ranks foods from 0 to 100 by how quickly they raise blood sugar?

The glycemic index gives pure glucose a score of 100 and springs surprises: white bread, white rice and potatoes all rank as high-GI foods, pushing blood sugar up fast.

After delivery, gestational diabetes usually does what?

Disappears: blood sugar usually returns to normal after the birth, but the mother is left with a higher chance of developing type 2 diabetes later in life.

The HbA1c blood test reflects average blood sugar over roughly what period?

Three months is roughly how long a red blood cell lives: sugar that sticks to its haemoglobin stays for the life of the cell, so the test reads like a running average.

What should a person with diabetes take first when blood sugar drops too low?

Fruit juice: half a cup supplies the 15 grams of fast carbohydrate advised when blood sugar falls below 70 mg/dL; diet soda won't work, because it contains no sugar.

A person's breath in diabetic ketoacidosis often smells of what?

Fruit or acetone: unable to use glucose, the body breaks down fat into ketones, and one of them, acetone, is breathed out, giving a smell often likened to pear drops.

Metformin, the main first-line drug for type 2 diabetes, traces its origins to research on which plant?

Goat's rue, or French lilac, was a medieval herbal remedy; its active compound proved too toxic when tested in the 1920s, so chemists turned to a gentler relative, and metformin reached patients in France in 1957.

Which artificial sweetener was discovered in the 1870s when a chemist noticed lab residue on his hands at dinner?

Saccharin: Constantin Fahlberg traced the flavour to a compound he had spilled at work; diabetics were soon stirring it into coffee, and the sugar shortages of the First World War took it mainstream.

Which American drug company launched Humulin, the first genetically engineered human insulin, in 1982?

Eli Lilly licensed the method from Genentech, whose scientists had coaxed E. coli bacteria into making the human hormone in 1978; until then, insulin had to be extracted from animal pancreases.

Which British biochemist won a Nobel Prize for working out insulin's amino acid sequence?

Frederick Sanger broke insulin into short fragments, worked out each one and pieced the full order together like a jigsaw; his second chemistry Nobel, in 1980, was for sequencing DNA.

Before genetically engineered insulin arrived in the 1980s, most insulin came from the pancreases of cattle and which other animal?

Pigs: for decades insulin was extracted from pork and beef pancreases left over from meatpacking; it saved millions of lives, but its animal origin caused allergic reactions in many patients.

Which body created World Diabetes Day with the International Diabetes Federation?

The World Health Organization and the federation created it in 1991 and chose 14 November because it is the birthday of Frederick Banting, insulin's co-discoverer; the United Nations made it an official day in 2006.

Which pair discovered the pancreas's role in diabetes in 1889 by removing a dog's pancreas?

Von Mering and Minkowski were not studying diabetes at all: they had removed the gland for a different experiment and were surprised when the dog came down with the disease.

In which 1989 film does Julia Roberts play Shelby, a young bride with type 1 diabetes?

Steel Magnolias: Robert Harling wrote it as a tribute to his sister Susan, a diabetic who died in 1985 after having a child against her doctors' advice; the film is dedicated 'For Susan, from Bob'.

Diabetes is the leading cause of chronic disease in which organ?

The kidneys: about one in three adults with diabetes has kidney disease, because years of high blood sugar damage the tiny filters that clean the blood.

Which diabetes device began in the 1960s as a prototype so bulky it had to be worn like a backpack?

The insulin pump: Arnold Kadish's 1963 prototype worked, but it was too bulky and complicated to sell, and pumps small enough for everyday life reached patients only in the late 1970s.

The GLP-1 drug class that includes semaglutide grew out of research into the venom of which animal?

The Gila monster's venom yielded exendin-4, a molecule shaped like the gut hormone GLP-1 that lasts hours instead of minutes; a synthetic copy, exenatide, reached patients in 2005.

Under which brand name is semaglutide, the drug in Ozempic, sold for weight loss?

Wegovy is a higher-dose version of the same weekly injection, approved for weight loss in 2021; demand was so explosive that it ran into manufacturing shortages.

Novo Nordisk, the insulin maker behind Ozempic, is headquartered in which country?

Denmark: the company grew from two rival insulin makers of the 1920s, after two brothers left Nordisk following a row with one of its founders and set up Novo; the pair merged only in 1989.

Diabetes insipidus, despite the name, is caused by a problem with which hormone?

Vasopressin tells the body to hold on to water; when it is missing or ignored, a person can pass up to 20 quarts of dilute urine a day and feels thirsty all the time.

Which pop star was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 13 in 2005?

Nick Jonas turned the experience into 'A Little Bit Longer', the song that gave the Jonas Brothers' 2008 album its title, and he went on to back his own charity, Beyond Type 1.

Damage to the retina from diabetes is the most common cause of blindness in which group?

People of working age: high blood sugar damages the blood vessels of the retina, often with no symptoms at first, which is why a dilated eye exam is urged at least once a year.

Apollinaire Bouchardat saw sugar vanish from patients' urine during 1870 rationing in which city?

Paris, cut off by the siege of 1870: watching his patients improve as food ran short, Bouchardat made 'eat as little as possible' his motto, and doctors repeated it for generations.

Why has insulin traditionally been injected rather than swallowed as a pill?

The stomach would destroy it: insulin is a protein, so acid and the gut break it into fragments like any food before it can reach the blood, which is why it goes in by needle or pen.

Which animals normally run higher blood sugar than other vertebrates of their size, apparently without harm?

Birds keep their blood sugar higher than other vertebrates of similar size, yet they show little of the damage it does in people and tend to outlive mammals of the same size.

Which famous physician of the Roman Empire wrote that he had seen diabetes only twice in his career?

Galen called the disease 'diarrhoea of the urine'; its rarity in his day may reflect ancient diets, or simply that doctors noticed it only in its late stages.

The ancient physicians Sushruta and Charaka first split diabetes into two types in which part of the world?

India: they tied one form to youth and the other to being overweight, close to the split between two types that Harold Himsworth set out for modern medicine in 1936.

Nerve damage from diabetes most often affects which part of the body?

The feet: numbness means a blister or a pebble in a shoe can go unnoticed and turn into an infected sore, which is why people with diabetes are told to check their feet every day.

Excessive thirst and urination are two of the three classic 'polys' of diabetes; what is the third?

Excessive hunger, or polyphagia: without working insulin, sugar can't get from the blood into the cells, so the body acts as if it is starving however much the person eats.

Which hormone from the pancreas works against insulin, raising blood sugar when it falls too low?

Glucagon is released when blood sugar drops and tells the liver to turn its stored glycogen back into glucose; it is made in the same islets as the insulin it opposes.

Type 1 diabetes incidence in children is highest in which part of the world?

Scandinavia and neighbouring Finland lead the world, yet just over the Finnish border in Russian Karelia, children with much the same genes develop type 1 about six times less often.

Which popular pet most often develops a form of diabetes that resembles human type 2?

Cats: overweight, inactive males run the highest risk, and with prompt treatment some go into remission and stop needing insulin, whereas a diabetic dog's illness resembles type 1.

Which mustachioed actor urged Americans to check their blood sugar in long-running diabetes commercials?

Wilford Brimley, already the face of Quaker Oats, made the adverts in his raspy baritone; they turned him into an internet meme and won him fans born decades after his films.

Around 2020, over one in three US adults had which condition?

Prediabetes: about 97 million US adults had blood sugar above normal but below the diabetic range, a warning stage that lifestyle changes can slow or reverse before it becomes type 2.

Which filmmaker was exempted from the Vietnam draft after army medical tests showed he had diabetes?

George Lucas was drafted for Vietnam but turned away when tests found the disease that had killed his paternal grandfather. A decade later he made Star Wars.

Which venomous sea creature uses its own insulin as a weapon to stun the fish it hunts?

The cone snail's venom carries a stripped-down insulin that passes through a fish's gills and sends its blood sugar plunging, leaving the fish too sluggish to escape.

Which science fiction author with diabetes co-founded the charity now called Diabetes UK in 1934?

H. G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds, launched the Diabetic Association with the physician Robert Lawrence, who was himself an early recipient of insulin in Britain.

Ancient physicians called diabetes 'honey urine' because patients' urine attracted which insects?

Ants gathering around a patient's urine served as one of the earliest tests for the disease, many centuries before chemists could measure sugar.

What colour is the circle introduced in 2006 as the universal symbol for diabetes?

Blue was chosen to echo the sky and the flag of the United Nations, because the symbol was designed for the campaign that won a UN resolution on the disease.

Trainers teach diabetes alert dogs the scent of blood sugar swings using samples of which body fluid?

Saliva samples from people with diabetes carry the scent the dogs learn to flag, and the first dog trained to detect lows was a Californian named Armstrong in 2003.

Which sitcom star, diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in her early thirties, became international chairperson of JDRF?

Mary Tyler Moore learned she had the disease shortly before her own sitcom began in 1970, and later wrote the memoir Growing Up Again about life with it.

In which book series does Stacey McGill at first try to hide her type 1 diabetes from friends?

The Baby-Sitters Club books, which have sold more than 190 million copies, make Stacey the group's treasurer because she excels at maths.

Which fashion doll gained a type 1 diabetes version in July 2025, complete with a glucose monitor?

Barbie's 2025 doll also carries a phone for checking her blood sugar, and follows a wheelchair-using friend launched in 1997 and a Barbie with Down syndrome in 2023.

Steve Redgrave won his fifth straight Olympic gold three years after a diabetes diagnosis in which sport?

Rowing brought Redgrave gold at five consecutive Games from 1984, and a Channel 4 poll later named the last of them the greatest sporting moment.

Which future British prime minister was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2012?

Theresa May was Home Secretary at the time, and went on to lead the country from 2016 to 2019 while managing the condition with daily insulin injections.

In which 2002 thriller does Kristen Stewart play Jodie Foster's diabetic daughter, cut off from her emergency syringes?

Panic Room shuts Jodie Foster's character and her daughter in a fortified hideaway without the girl's emergency syringes, so her falling blood sugar becomes the ticking clock.

Which month is National Diabetes Month in the United States and also contains World Diabetes Day?

November was chosen for World Diabetes Day because the 14th is the birthday of Frederick Banting, who helped conceive the work that led to insulin.

Which kind of specialist doctor treats diabetes along with thyroid and other hormone disorders?

An endocrinologist specialises in the glands that release hormones straight into the bloodstream, a group that includes the pancreas, the thyroid and the adrenals.

Which organ stores spare glucose as glycogen and releases it into the blood between meals?

The liver can hold roughly 100 grams of glycogen, and it is this store, not the one in muscle, that keeps blood sugar steady during a fast.

What do doctors call the spell after a type 1 diabetes diagnosis when the body's own insulin output briefly recovers?

The honeymoon phase can let people go some time with little or no injected insulin, but the recovery is temporary and the need for full doses returns.

Which brain condition have some researchers proposed calling 'type 3 diabetes' because of shared features?

Alzheimer's disease shows a number of parallels with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, though the 'type 3' label remains a research proposal and not a formal diagnosis.

Deliberate insulin comas were a common psychiatric treatment in the 1940s and 1950s, mainly for which illness?

Schizophrenia patients, among them the mathematician John Nash, were put into daily comas over several weeks until antipsychotic drugs replaced the practice in the 1960s.

'Bronze diabetes' is an old name for a condition in which the body stores too much of which metal?

Iron settling in the pancreas disrupts insulin production, while the skin takes on the bronze tint that the physician Armand Trousseau first described in 1865.

Which gut bacterium did Genentech engineer in 1978 to produce the first synthetic human insulin?

E. coli carrying a human gene became a living insulin factory, and the result was the first medicine made with modern genetic engineering.

Which British chemist worked out the three-dimensional structure of insulin in 1969 after 35 years of effort?

Dorothy Hodgkin was first handed a sample of crystalline insulin in 1934, and collected a Nobel Prize for other molecules while she waited for the technology to catch up.

Before insulin, American physician Frederick Allen kept diabetes patients alive longer with what drastic treatment?

A starvation diet of as little as 400 calories a day, with almost no starch or sugar, bought patients extra time, though some wasted away before insulin arrived.

Student Charles Best reportedly got the first shift as Frederick Banting's insulin assistant by winning what?

A coin toss against fellow student Clark Noble reportedly decided who took the opening four weeks, and Best went on to be remembered as a co-discoverer of insulin.

The Flame of Hope, lit in 1989 to burn until diabetes is cured, stands outside Banting House in which Ontario city?

London, Ontario, is where Frederick Banting woke at two in the morning in 1920 with the idea that led to insulin, and the Queen Mother kindled the flame there.

Team Novo Nordisk, a professional team made up entirely of athletes with type 1 diabetes, competes in which sport?

Cycling squad Team Novo Nordisk began in 2005 as Team Type 1, and a line-up of its riders won the 3,000-mile Race Across America in 2009.

Which TV chef revealed in 2012 that she had type 2 diabetes, three years after her diagnosis?

Paula Deen, the Savannah restaurateur famous for Southern cooking, announced it together with a paid role as spokesperson for a diabetes drug company.

Which baseball great was left almost blind by diabetes before dying at the age of 53 in 1972?

Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball's colour line in 1947, was diagnosed soon after he stopped playing, and the disease also afflicted his brothers.

Which guitarist, diagnosed with diabetes in 1990, spent years starring in TV adverts for glucose meters?

B.B. King, the bluesman who named his guitar Lucille, became a high-profile spokesman on the disease and appeared in OneTouch commercials from the early 2000s.

Which glam metal frontman, diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at six, once collapsed on stage at Madison Square Garden?

Bret Michaels of Poison went public about his condition after that collapse was blamed on drugs, and later won Celebrity Apprentice, earning $640,000 for the American Diabetes Association.

In which 1997 action film does Nicolas Cage's hero hunt for a syringe so his diabetic cellmate can have insulin?

Con Air puts Cage's parolee and his best friend Baby-O, played by Mykelti Williamson, aboard a prison transport flight seized by its convicts.

A diabetes group in Australia began issuing ID cards in 1954 after police mistook a man's diabetic emergency for what?

Drunkenness was the charge when the man was arrested; he fell into a coma and died in custody, and the campaigner Ruby Board pushed for the cards in response.

Where do manufacturers recommend storing unopened insulin so that it stays effective until the expiry date?

In a refrigerator, at roughly 36 to 46°F, insulin lasts to its printed date; it can also cope with up to 28 days unchilled, but insulin that has been frozen should never be used.

Which jazz singer had both legs amputated below the knee in 1993 because of diabetes?

Ella Fitzgerald, the First Lady of Song, also had her eyesight damaged by the disease, and in that same year she set up a charitable foundation that funds diabetes research among other causes.

In which 2022 Netflix romance does a singer newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes struggle to afford her insulin?

Purple Hearts has its heroine Cassie working several jobs to pay for the drug, then marrying a Marine for the health insurance given to military spouses.

Exubera, launched by Pfizer in 2006 and withdrawn a year later, let people take insulin in what new way?

As an inhaled powder, Exubera was absorbed through the lungs, but poor sales ended it, even though German researchers had first floated the idea back in 1924.

The 'thrifty gene' hypothesis says genes that now raise type 2 diabetes risk once helped people survive what?

Famine was the threat geneticist J. V. Neel had in mind in 1962: bodies that store fat efficiently in times of plenty are, he argued, primed for a shortage that never comes.

In which Christopher Nolan film does a diabetic wife test her forgetful husband by asking for repeated insulin shots?

Memento presents the episode as the story of Sammy Jankis, an insurance claimant the film's hero once investigated and whose amnesia he doubted.

Which German tennis star revealed in 2022 that he has had type 1 diabetes since the age of three?

Alexander Zverev launched a foundation for people with diabetes that same year, and at the 2023 French Open he was told he could not inject insulin on court.

Which Native American people of Arizona have been intensively studied for the world's highest rate of type 2 diabetes?

Pima communities in Arizona have far higher rates than their close genetic relatives across the border in Mexico, which points to diet and lifestyle and not genes alone.

A vial of insulin appears on the back of which Canadian polymer banknote, first issued in 2011?

The $100 note pairs the vial with a DNA double helix under the theme of medical innovation, with former prime minister Robert Borden on the front.

Refugee Eva Saxl survived in wartime Shanghai by making her own insulin from the pancreases of which animals?

Water buffalo pancreases, worked up in a borrowed basement laboratory, replaced black-market insulin that cost gold bars and had killed one of her friends.

Which American physicist shared a 1977 Nobel Prize for a lab technique first used to measure insulin in blood?

Rosalyn Yalow co-developed the radioimmunoassay, sensitive enough to track hormones in tiny traces, and became the first American-born woman to win the medicine prize.

Which Canadian biochemist purified the first insulin extract enough for Leonard Thompson to be treated safely in 1922?

James Collip joined the team in December 1921, and his cleaner extract let the 14-year-old recover after an earlier injection had caused a severe allergic reaction.

Which Canadian city gives its name to a protocol, published in 2000, for transplanting islets to treat type 1 diabetes?

Edmonton's University of Alberta team infuses islets from donor pancreases into the patient's portal vein, then uses drugs to stop the body rejecting them.

The Joslin Diabetes Center, named for America's first diabetes specialist, is based in which city?

Boston's Joslin clinic grew from the practice of Elliott Joslin, who kept the world's first diabetes registry and wrote the first English-language textbook on the disease.

Which 1990 film dramatises the trials of Claus von Bülow, accused of injecting his wife Sunny with insulin?

Reversal of Fortune follows the appeal that overturned his conviction; at the retrial, eight medical experts testified that insulin had not caused her comas.

Phlorizin, the natural compound behind the SGLT2 class of diabetes drugs, is found mainly in the bark of which tree?

Apple root bark is rich in phlorizin, which lowers blood sugar by blocking the transporters that carry glucose back into the blood; it was the first of the gliflozins.

Rapper Phife Dawg, who died from complications of diabetes in 2016 at 45, co-founded which hip-hop group?

A Tribe Called Quest released a final album eight months after his death that still featured his verses; he had been diagnosed in 1990, the year of the group's debut.

Which Flyers captain won back-to-back Stanley Cups in the 1970s despite having type 1 diabetes since boyhood?

Bobby Clarke slipped to the second round of the draft because NHL teams feared the condition, until a Flyers scout phoned a specialist who said he would be fine if he looked after himself.

The 'diabetes belt' of the United States takes in parts of 14 states and the whole of which one?

Mississippi sits at the centre of the belt, which also reaches north into Ohio and Pennsylvania, further than its Deep South image suggests.