In this section you have learnt how the body maintains safe blood glucose concentrations by using insulin and other hormones to regulate key physiological processes.

Specifically you will be able to demonstrate knowledge of:

• Decreasing blood glucose concentrations through the actions of insulin on glucose transport, glucose storage as glycogen, and glucose utilisation to produce ATP.
• Increasing blood glucose concentrations through the actions of glucagon and other catabolic hormones to produce new glucose from non-carbohydrate sources (gluconeogenesis) and release glucose from glycogen (glycogenolysis).
• How insulin works to control these processes.

This section helps us understand what happens in healthy people, so that we can better understand what happens in diabetes, when insulin is absent, at low levels or the body is resistant to the actions of insulin. This means that the regulation of high concentrations of blood glucose is limited, causing the acute and chronic complications seen in diabetes.

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