Diabetes Mellitus Terms

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) has categorized diabetes mellitus into the following types:

Type 1, insulin-dependent diabetes, which requires insulin usage for life time.

Type 2, non-insulin-dependent diabetes, which does not require insulin for sustaining life. Change in lifestyle, eating habits, exercise, oral hypoglycemics may be used to keep it under control.

Impaired glucose tolerance, in which glucose levels are between normal and diabetic.

Gestational diabetes, develops in women during pregnancy and usually resolves after pregnancy.

Proper way of transcription – "Type" is followed by Arabic letter "1 or 2" in whic type is lower cased unless starting the sentence. Hyphen is not used to join the "type" with "Arabic numeral."

For example: Type 1 diabetes mellitus or diabetes mellitus type 2.

Non-insulin-dependent and insulin-dependent are always hyphenated either preceding or following the noun "diabetes."

Insulin Terminology:
There are namely four types of insulin classified as:

Fast acting (Humalog insulin)

Short acting (Regular insulin)

Intermediate acting (NPH and Lente)

Extended or long acting: (ultralente insulin)

How to write the concentration: Concentration of insulin is measured in units per milliliter of blood. Normally, the insulin is transcribed as 40 units, 35 units and so on but the ideal way is to write a capital letter "U" followed by number of milliliters without any space between U and numeral to describe its concentration.

For example:

U35: 35 units of insulin per milliliter of blood.

U 70: 70 units of insulin per milliliter of blood.

Caution: The old theory of transcribing Ad verbatim should always be applied and transcribe as dictated. If U is dictated, transcribe U. If units is dictated, transcribe units and there is no need to change it to U.