The pancreas: an unknown gland and yet – in the event of a problem – responsible for dreadful, sometimes fatal diseases.
Since the dawn of time, all living beings, from bacteria to mammoths, have needed energy to live, grow and reproduce. The essential source has always remained sugar, glucose. The combustion of sugar inside our body indeed produces energy, heat and water. But to pass this sugar from the outside inside all our cells that absolutely need it, you need a key. That key is insulin. A word that all diabetics know well. But who manufactures this insulin? This is the role of a little-known but nevertheless essential gland: the pancreas. This gland is located deep in our belly, behind the stomach.
An important role in digestion
If its role in the secretion of insulin is well known, we often forget that this organ also plays an important role in digestion. It is indeed he who provides the enzymes that will participate in the degradation of food. Enzymes are in fact not only used to make laundry, but are very corrosive substances without which a beefsteak, even chewed by the best teeth, even attacked by stomach acids, has no chance of being degraded. into essential elements.
Its dysfunction responsible for many diseases
We therefore understand that the malfunction of the pancreas will result in a whole series of not very sympathetic diseases. Diabetes, of course, but imagine for a moment that all these enzymes which, theoretically, are satisfied with an evacuation by the intestine, start to act in an anarchic way. This is precisely what happens in a disease called pancreatitis, a kind of self-digestion of the gland by its own elements. At the time of blood tests for nothing, how do you know if your pancreas is functioning normally? We can of course measure the enzymes in the blood, but today, in the slightest doubt, it is the scanner that we will ask to ensure the diagnosis of pancreatitis… or cancer. Because this pancreatic cancer is certainly one of the most dreaded in the medical profession.
However, we must reassure those who have never heard of all these diseases. They are not silent and are accompanied by jaundice, severe pain and weight loss. And they are also quite infrequent.
