This diabetes trivia quiz has 50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'diabetes' comes from a Greek word meaning what?
A passer-through or siphon
Apollonius of Memphis is credited with first using it around 230 BCE.
Q 02Thomas Willis added 'mellitus' to the name in 1675 after noticing what about patients' urine?
It tasted sweet
Ancient Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians and Indians had all noticed the sweetness; in India the disease was 'honey urine' because it attracted ants.
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 of the condition was formerly known by what name?
Adult-onset
Rates have risen sharply since 1960 in step with obesity, and it is now increasingly diagnosed in children.
Q 05Which two Canadians isolated and purified insulin in Toronto in 1921 and 1922?
Frederick Banting and Charles Best
They worked in John Macleod's laboratory, with biochemist James Collip helping to purify the extract.
Q 06For how much was the patent for insulin sold to the University of Toronto?
One dollar
Banting and Macleod were reluctant to patent it at all on ethical grounds.
Q 07Banting shared his 1923 Nobel money with Best after the prize went to Banting and whom?
John Macleod
Banting was 32, making him the youngest ever laureate in physiology or medicine.
Q 08How old was Banting when he won the Nobel Prize, making him its youngest medicine laureate?
32
He was killed in 1941 when his plane crashed in Newfoundland after both engines failed.
Q 09Leonard Thompson, the first person injected with insulin in January 1922, was how old?
13
He lived until 1935; before insulin, diabetic children survived only a couple of years on near-starvation diets.
Q 10Elizabeth, one of the first Americans treated with insulin in 1922, was the daughter of which statesman?
Charles Evans Hughes
Before insulin she was kept alive by Dr Frederick Allen's starvation diet.
Q 11The word 'insulin' comes from the Latin insula, meaning what?
Island
It is made in the islets of the pancreas discovered by Paul Langerhans.
Q 12Which German medical student discovered the pancreatic islets that bear his name in 1869?
Paul Langerhans
He described 'islands of clear cells' in his doctoral thesis at the Berlin Pathological Institute.
Q 13Which cells in the pancreatic islets produce insulin?
Beta
Alpha cells make glucagon, which raises blood sugar; a healthy adult has about a million islets.
Q 14Roughly what share of the pancreas by volume is made up of the hormone-producing islets?
Q 21Hypoglycaemia is usually defined as blood glucose below what level?
70 mg/dL
That is 3.9 mmol/L; the fix is 10 to 20 grams of fast carbohydrate.
Q 22A person's breath in diabetic ketoacidosis often smells of what?
Fruit or acetone
Some describe it as pear drops; deep gasping 'Kussmaul' breathing is another sign.
Q 23Metformin, the main first-line drug for type 2 diabetes, traces its origins to research on which plant?
Goat's rue, or French lilac
Galega officinalis was a folk remedy for centuries; the drug was introduced in France in 1957 as Glucophage, 'glucose eater'.
1 to 2 percent
They nonetheless receive 10 to 15 percent of the organ's blood flow.
Q 15The word 'pancreas' comes from Greek words meaning what?
All flesh
Herophilus first identified the organ around 300 BC; it sits behind the stomach and is 99 percent digestive tissue.
Q 16Type 1 diabetes is what kind of condition?
An autoimmune disorder
The immune system destroys the insulin-producing beta cells; it accounts for 5 to 10 percent of cases and was once called juvenile diabetes.
Q 17Roughly what proportion of all diabetes cases are type 2?
About 90%
It was formerly called adult-onset diabetes and is driven mainly by obesity and lack of exercise.
Q 18Per the International Diabetes Federation, roughly how many people had diabetes worldwide in 2021?
537 million
That is up from an estimated 108 million in 1980.
Q 19Gestational diabetes develops during what?
Pregnancy
It usually resolves after delivery, though the child faces a higher long-term risk of type 2.
Q 20The HbA1c blood test reflects average blood sugar over roughly what period?
Three months
Sugar attaches to haemoglobin in red cells by glycation; a result above 6.5% points to diabetes.
Q 24In 2023 metformin ranked where among the most prescribed medications in the United States?
Second
More than 85 million prescriptions were written for it that year.
Q 25Which company sold the first commercially available biosynthetic human insulin, Humulin, in 1982?
Genentech with Eli Lilly
Insulin was the first protein made by recombinant DNA; Eli Lilly had also been first to mass-produce it in the 1920s.
Q 26In which year did Frederick Sanger work out a hormone's full amino acid structure?
1955
It was the first protein ever fully sequenced; the molecule has 51 amino acids in two chains.
Q 27How many amino acids make up a molecule of human insulin?
51
The A-chain has 21 and the B-chain 30, joined by disulfide bonds.
Q 28In which year did the International Diabetes Federation and WHO launch World Diabetes Day?
1991
It falls on 14 November, Frederick Banting's birthday, and the UN adopted a resolution on it in 2006.
Q 29Which pair discovered the pancreas's role in diabetes in 1889 by removing a dog's pancreas?
Von Mering and Minkowski
The dog developed the classic excessive urination and thirst.
Q 30Which physician wrote the earliest surviving detailed account of diabetes, in the 2nd century CE?
Aretaeus of Cappadocia
Indian physicians of the 6th century separately called it madhumeha, honey urine.