Make sure you know these five common diabetes symptoms.
For a disease that currently kills 1.6 million people a year, some of the more common symptoms of diabetes can be misconstrued as normal or misdiagnosed to other diseases.
It is usual for most people to just gloss over these symptoms or expect them to go away on their own, untreated. This might then lead to life-threatening complications and might even make a prediabetic person completely diabetic instead of having the opportunity to reverse it. We list down the most common diabetic alarm bells that you shouldn’t ignore.
- Excessive Urination
While at first, this might seem to be caused by excessive drinking of alcohol and caffeine, polyuria (excessive urination) can also be a glaring sign of diabetes mellitus. The kidneys filtering the blood can’t quite keep up with the amount of sugar in the bloodstream and are unable to reabsorb the excess sugar. Since none of the excess sugar can be reabsorbed, they instead end up in urine where they draw more water.
- Extreme Fatigue
In medical terms, fatigue is extreme tiredness that isn’t cured by resting or sleeping. While a lot of factors, primarily depression or anemia, could’ve caused fatigue, in diabetes, fatigue can be caused by high blood sugar levels. Inflammation can also cause fatigue, which happens when blood vessels get inflamed by the excess sugar.
- Nausea
A sensation of extreme discomfort in the upper stomach with an involuntary urge to vomit, nausea can either be psychological or physical in origin. For diabetics, nausea is caused by hyperglycemia (high blood sugar level), hypoglycemia (low blood sugar level, and hypotension (low blood pressure). The sudden rise and fall of your blood sugar level might scramble your body’s metabolism that can lead to you feeling nauseous.
- Unexplained Weight Loss
Unintentionally occurring and significant weight loss can be a warning sign of diabetes. Aside from diabetes, this can also be caused by cancer, depression, HIV/AIDs, Tuberculosis, and the use of recreational drugs. People with diabetes experience weight loss when insufficient insulin prevents their body to get enough glucose from the blood and then transfer into the body’s cells to use for energy. The body then starts burning the stored fat that it has in lieu of the energy it should’ve gotten from the glucose in the blood.
- Slow healing wounds
Neuropathy, one of the more severe complications of diabetes, is also known as nerve damage. This occurs when the excess sugar in your body has already damaged the walls of your capillaries. These small blood vessels are responsible for bringing nourishment to your nerves. Slow healing wounds are the byproduct of this complication, and they can be problematic when left untreated. They can even result to amputations.
Little Things Matter
Small complications such as the symptoms we listed here gradually add up or worsen if left untreated. The prediabetes that you still might have reversed become irreversible as diabetes becomes a very real possibility.
Taking herbal supplements for diabetes to try reversing your prediabetes might be a good idea if you happen to encounter these symptoms, and then going to your doctor to be thoroughly checked to be sure. These little things eventually add up and it would be wise to remember that while nothing small ever chokes you, nothing big ever gets in your eye.
