Emil Martinka, Silvia Dókušová, Radovan Plášil, Peter Lakota, Ján Čulák
There is only few branches of medicine which report such an amount of new knowledge of pathogenesis and therapy of DM. It is connected with medical and universal severity and at the same time with multifactority and diversity of the disease. DM is not a single disease with a simple cause, homogenous symptoms and methods of treatment. Actually, it is a large group of diseases. The most frequent and the most important cause of hyperglycaemia is insufficient or extincted insulin production (typical for diabetes mellitus 1 type DM - 1 ) and lower sensitivity of tissues to insulin together with functional disorders of insulin secretion (typical for diabetes mellitus 2 type DM - 2).Both groups of disorders result from more mechanisms many of them genetically determined. Genetic predisposition is stronger and pathogenesis is more multiform in DM - 2 than in DM-1. While in DM – 1 the cause is more or less clarified (it is an autoimmune destruction of β-cells of the pancreas in genetically predisposed terrain.) in DM - 2 the pathogenetic mechanism is only outlined (lower sensitivity of tissues to insulin and functional disorders of insulin secretion). Problem of different therapeutic approach to single types of the disease is considered.While in DM - 1 the main disorder is insufficient insulin production the only effective therapy is its exogennous substitution. Insulintherapy has recently reported several crucial knowledge that resulted in development of insulin analogues (synthetically prepared insulins with intentionally changed sequence of aminoacids) that are more suitable for organism physiology than conventional substances and enable to reach better glycaemic control in a larger proportion of patients with a lower risk of adverse effects. The key effort in the last years in DM - 2 therapy has been aimed at insulin resistance affecting with outlook of improvement of cardiovascular prognosis. This resulted in development of glitasons and glitasars that affect expression of genes and their products present in metabolism of fats, carbohydtrates and further processes affecting cardiovascular risk. Further new groups of drugs are expected to be launched in several months. The problem of DM therapy is getting more effective on one side but on the other side it is more complicated.