Diabetes can be managed, and early detection is very important. In order to detect it early, you either find out during a routine check up, or through noticing the symptoms. Diabetes symptoms can range from fatigue to blurred vision. However, how many of us feel these symptoms in our daily lives and blame it on one of many different issues.
These diabetic symptoms are hard to notice, and even harder to jump to the conclusion of diabetes. Because diabetes symptoms are often over looked, many do not find out early enough, and the complications associated with diabetes become worse.
However, if you’re fortunate to notice diabetic symptoms early enough, it can mean lower risks of complications that come with diabetes. To understand these diabetic symptoms, it helps to understand the differences between type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes means that your blood has too much glucose and your cells not enough. Type 2 diabetes means that your body has become resistant to the insulin it produces. In both cases, your cells do not get enough, or any of the insulin that they need, and your body responds to it by giving you the diabetic symptoms listed below.
Here is a list of some diabetic symptoms that may present. Frequent need to urinate is a major diabetic symptom. Because your kidneys cannot filter glucose back to the blood when your own insulin is not there or not working, it attempts to dilute the glucose by drawing water out of the blood. However, this also causes you to feel the need to drink water all day. The effect of diabetic symptoms like these is a full bladder.
Another one of the more prominent diabetic symptoms is weight loss. This is more so in Type 1 diabetes. Because there is not enough energy for your cells, your body begins to break down fat and muscle in order to get the energy it so desperately craves. This can happen very fast with type 1, but because type 2 happens more gradually, diabetic symptoms like this one are harder to notice. What’s more, diabetic symptoms that go hand in hand like those mentioned above can easily mask the underlying problem when looking at type 2 diabetes.
One more set of diabetic symptoms that silently creep when talking about type 2 is tingling or numbness in your extremities. This is caused by the excess glucose in your blood damaging your nervous system. This particular diabetic symptom is called neuropathy. Because the onset is so gradual, many people do not know that this numbness means type 2 diabetes. Moreover, it is very likely that the blood sugar was high for quite a few years, making diabetic symptoms like this one very serious. Luckily however, once type 2 has been diagnosed, and your blood glucose put under control, your neuropathy can improve.
The last few diabetic symptoms to mention would be blurred vision, frequent infections or wounds that are hard to heal, and weakness and fatigue. Once again, glucose is at the route cause of all of these diabetic symptoms. For the weakness and fatigue, the obvious reason is the lack of energy your cells need to keep you up and going.
All of these diabetic symptoms cab be hard to self diagnose, so it is very important to keep to a good medical checkup routine. And if you do notice any one of the above diabetic symptoms, don’t hesitate to mention it to your doctor so that they can do some simple blood work to catch it.