If you have seen a loved one suffer from diabetes mellitus, you would know that though the disease is not fatal, for severe cases it can turn life-threatening if the warning signs of diabetes are not taken seriously. The patient needs to understand the prediabetes risk factors, take appropriate medication and require regular healthcare in managing this illness which may include changing his lifestyle. If you do not have this disease or you wish to find out more information about it or learn how to prevent getting it, then it is important to read up lots of health care information. Then you will learn what the symptoms for diabetes are, the risk factors for diabetes, their causes and your required food and diet plan so that you can prevent getting it.
Before learning about what are these symptoms are, it is recommended that you familiarize yourself with the necessary health information, the different types of diabetes known in medical research and diabetes health study. You may also like to read up our recent article on “Types of Diabetes”.
The following diabetes symptoms can be found in both type 1 diabetes
and type 2 diabetes:
- Weight Loss: This is the most visible sign of the illness due to cells being deprived of glucose and the body is then forced to use the stored fats to nourish them. As a result, the body loses weight, sometimes at an alarming rate.
- Tingling Feeling: The disease can cause some damage to your nerves feeling a tingling and numbness sensation in your hands, fingers, toes and other parts of your body.
- Fatigue: There is a general weakness of the body and it feels tired. It is possible that it is having a failure to process the glucose in the blood to turn it into energy for your body to function normally.
- Increased Urination and Always Thirsty: The body cells are unable to process the glucose causing a rise in blood levels. There is dryness in your mouth and your body naturally requires more water which results in the need to pass more urine.
- Mood Swings: Unable to focus or becoming more irritable or your mental alertness takes a nose dive are all symptoms of induced high blood sugars.
- Hunger: Diabetics often feel hungry as their body cells lack glucose and by eating more meals containing high glucose levels or hyperglycemia takes place and aggravates the condition.
- Itchy skin: People with diabetes may have skin infections and feel itchy over many parts of their body especially in their private parts, more so for women sufferers.
- Blurred Vision: Complications set in when you have high blood sugar in your body.Your eye lenses do not function normally with a possible retina damage. Your vision then becomes blurred and if left untreated may become blind.
- Rapid Breathing: The high glucose level often leads to higher blood acidity which usually leads to more rapid breathing.
- Wounds That Heal Slow: Healing of any skin rashes or wound tends to be very slow and during the time, the skin feels itchy. Some people with diabetes get flaky skin.
- Body Aches: Some patients report experiencing body aches and pains after eating sugary foods like chocolate, although this is not very common among the signs and symptoms.
Symptoms for Gestational Diabetes
There are no clear risk factors for gestational diabetes and therefore no symptoms found for those diagnosed with this condition. However pregnant women who suffer from this disease experienced much weight gain, hunger, excessive thirst, develop frequent urination needs and vaginal vaginal dryness and infections.
For pregnant women, their body cells tend to be somewhat affected by the hormonal changes taking place. Usually the problem starts when their pancreas cannot cope with more demand for insulin and that may cause their blood glucose to rise.
Living With Diabetes| The Fight against this disease
If you have some of these signs and symptoms, got yourself tested and given a diagnosis of any types of diabetes, what next you asked? Well you would have to consult your doctor and work towards the best treatments for diabetes and special diet and exercise plan prescribed by your doctor if you don’t want any complications of the disease. Millions of people have learned to live with it, managing it and many people were able to stay relatively healthy and stop diabetes from becoming a life-threatening illness.
The American Diabetes Association is also leading the fight against the disease and actively doing more testing. It’s their priority in making sure that more people can get treatment early once the illness has been detected.
The oral glucose tolerance test is now a very common and effective test to diagnose diabetes.
Children’s Diabetes-More Dangerous, Harder Controlled?
It looks like children are not spared from such diseases and parents of such children will be fast to tell you this is a concern and it can be a real challenge especially if their children are too young to understand the complications of diabetes. Those with obesity problems may find it more difficult as the strict diet can be a real challenge. It doesn’t help that with children its more like diabetes without symptoms especially in the early stages.
With children the most common signs to look out for are frequent urination and unquenchable thirst. This is caused by too much sugar in their blood that makes them thirsty. It’s a vicious cycle, the child gets thirsty and has to drink lots of fluid and that caused him to have frequent urination.
Then comes blurred vision which is a lot more telltale sign to be alerted with and one in which your child will quickly complain to his family about his problem. This symptom however is usually temporary so it may be good to educate your children on some of the pre-diabetes conditions. In fact many of the symptoms that a child may get can also be found in the type-1 and type-2 diabetes mentioned in another article on our website.
