Diabetes Trivia
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This diabetes trivia quiz has 99 free questions with answers and covers the disease from ancient Egypt to Ozempic: where the word comes from, why 'mellitus' means honey, the Toronto team that isolated insulin in 1921 and sold the patent for a dollar, the 14-year-old who got the first injection, and the youngest ever medicine Nobel laureate. It also covers the science and the everyday realities: what the pancreas and its islets do, how type 1 differs from type 2, gestational diabetes, the HbA1c test, hypoglycaemia, the fruity breath of ketoacidosis, metformin's origins in French lilac, glucose meters and pumps, GLP-1 drugs from Gila monster venom, and why World Diabetes Day is on 14 November. It suits health-awareness events, nursing students and anyone living with the condition. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing. This quiz is for general knowledge, not medical advice.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'diabetes' comes from a Greek word meaning what?
A passer-through or siphon
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.
Q 02What did the English physician Thomas Willis report about his diabetic patients' urine in the 1670s?
It tasted sweet
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.
Q 03Which Egyptian manuscript from around 1500 BCE mentions 'too great emptying of the urine'?
The Ebers papyrus
It even recommends a drink to take for the condition.
Q 04Type 2 diabetes was formerly known by what name?
Adult-onset
Adult-onset stopped fitting: type 2 is now increasingly diagnosed in children, as rates have climbed alongside obesity since 1960.
Q 05Which Oscar-winning actor announced on David Letterman's show in 2013 that he had type 2 diabetes?
Tom Hanks
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.
Q 06For how much did insulin's discoverers sell their patent rights to their university?
One dollar
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.
Q 07Banting shared his 1923 Nobel money with Best after the prize went to Banting and whom?
John Macleod
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.
Q 08Insulin pioneer Frederick Banting died in 1941 in what kind of wartime accident?
Plane crash
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.
Q 09In which Canadian city did teenager Leonard Thompson receive the world's first insulin injection in January 1922?
Toronto
Toronto: the first dose failed and raised an abscess, so James Collip spent twelve days purifying the extract before a second attempt that worked.
Q 10Which US Supreme Court justice has lived with type 1 diabetes since she was a child?
Sonia Sotomayor
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.
Q 11The word 'insulin' comes from the Latin insula, meaning what?
Island
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.
Q 12Which German medical student discovered the pancreatic islets that bear his name in 1869?
Paul Langerhans
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.
Q 13Which cells in the pancreatic islets produce insulin?
Beta
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.
Q 21A person's breath in diabetic ketoacidosis often smells of what?
Fruit or acetone
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.
Q 22Metformin, the main first-line drug for type 2 diabetes, traces its origins to research on which plant?
Goat's rue, or French lilac
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.
Q 23Which artificial sweetener was discovered in the 1870s when a chemist noticed lab residue on his hands at dinner?
Q 14The hormone-making islets are only about 2 percent of the pancreas; what does the rest of the organ mainly produce?
Digestive enzymes
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.
Q 15The word 'pancreas' comes from Greek words meaning what?
All flesh
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.
Q 16Type 1 diabetes is what kind of condition?
An autoimmune disorder
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.
Q 17Which scale ranks foods from 0 to 100 by how quickly they raise blood sugar?
The glycemic index
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.
Q 18After delivery, gestational diabetes usually does what?
Disappears
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.
Q 19The HbA1c blood test reflects average blood sugar over roughly what period?
Three months
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.
Q 20What should a person with diabetes take first when blood sugar drops too low?
Fruit juice
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.
Saccharin
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.
Q 24Which American drug company launched Humulin, the first genetically engineered human insulin, in 1982?
Eli Lilly
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.
Q 25Which British biochemist won a Nobel Prize for working out insulin's amino acid sequence?
Frederick Sanger
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.
Q 26Before genetically engineered insulin arrived in the 1980s, most insulin came from the pancreases of cattle and which other animal?
Pigs
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.
Q 27Which body created World Diabetes Day with the International Diabetes Federation?
World Health Organization
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.
Q 28Which pair discovered the pancreas's role in diabetes in 1889 by removing a dog's pancreas?
Von Mering and Minkowski
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.
Q 29In which 1989 film does Julia Roberts play Shelby, a young bride with type 1 diabetes?
Steel Magnolias
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'.
Q 30Diabetes is the leading cause of chronic disease in which organ?
The kidneys
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.