Diabetes & Blood Sugar

What is diabetes? Diabetes, also called diabetes mellitus, is a condition in which your blood glucose (blood sugar) levels are too high.

Hypoglycaemia ("hypo" or low blood sugar) is a blood glucose below 70 mg/dL. It mostly affects people with diabetes on insulin or certain oral tablets — and in them it is a true emergency.

Prediabetes means your blood sugar is above normal but not yet in the diabetes range. It is not "almost diabetes" — it is the single best window for preventing diabetes entirely.

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is when the body's immune system destroys the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. Without insulin, sugar can't get into cells, and levels build up in the blood.

Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) is a serious, life-threatening complication of diabetes. It develops when the body doesn't have enough insulin to let glucose into cells for energy, so it starts breaking down fat instead — producing acidic chemicals called ketones.

Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes. In India, it now affects over 100 million adults, and most develop it about a decade earlier than Europeans — often in the 30s and 40s, at BMI values that look "normal" by Western cut-offs but are obese by Asian ones.