What are the warning signs of diabetes?
Diabetes is a disease that everyone knows about and most people agree that the cause comes from eating food that is too sweet or spicy, including various types of starches, and the risk is even higher if the family has a history of diabetes .
But what many people don’t know is the warning signs that warn us that we are about to have diabetes. What are the symptoms? How can we observe them? Health has information to share.
Getting to know diabetes
Diabetes is a condition in which the bloodstream has a higher than normal sugar level due to a lack of insulin hormone or a decrease in the efficiency of insulin hormone. This causes the blood sugar level to rise. If left untreated for a long time, the body can easily develop complications in various organs, such as the eyes, kidneys, and nervous system. Most of the food we eat, the body will react by changing the โปรโมชั่นพิเศษจาก UFABET สมัครตอนนี้ รับโบนัสทันที food into glucose in the bloodstream to use as energy. When we take a blood sample, cells in the pancreas called beta cells create insulin, which is what transports glucose into the cells to use as energy.
The importance of insulin to the body
As mentioned at the beginning when we first learned about diabetes , insulin is an important hormone in the body. It is created and released from the beta cells of the pancreas. Its function is to transport glucose to various tissues of the body for burning and as energy that is important for daily life. If the body lacks insulin or insulin does not work effectively, the body will not be able to use it, causing blood sugar levels to rise and leading to diabetes. In addition to abnormalities in carbohydrate metabolism, there are also other abnormalities, such as the breakdown of fat and protein.
How does diabetes occur?
Normally, the occurrence of diabetes is related to a hormone that is produced by the liver, which is insulin. This hormone is the one that brings glucose from the blood into cells in various organs throughout the body, such as the brain, liver, kidneys, and heart, so that the cells can use glucose as energy for their work. However, if the process of producing insulin is abnormal, the liver produces less insulin than it should, or there is some abnormality that prevents the cells from using glucose, even though the liver produces hormones at a normal level, or what is called insulin resistance cells, when both abnormalities occur, it will cause a large amount of sugar to accumulate in the blood, causing the abnormality to progress and eventually become diabetes.
Although we know how diabetes occurs and what processes in the body are abnormal, the exact cause of its occurrence is still unknown. However, studies have found that it is a rather complex process that is caused by both genetics and our lifestyle.
What are the symptoms of diabetes?
The main symptoms that indicate that a person is at risk of diabetes may include feeling hungry frequently, thirsty, and urinating a lot and frequently. There are also other symptoms such as:
- Tired and exhausted
- Dry skin, itching of the skin area
- Dry eyes
- Have numbness in your feet or a tingling sensation in the tips of your toes or feet.
- The body becomes abnormally thin, for no apparent reason.
- When wounds occur in various parts of the body, they tend to heal slower than normal, especially wounds that occur on the feet.
- Unexplained blurred vision
10 warning signs that you might have diabetes or not
- Easily fatigued, even though you get enough rest and are not sick.
- Unexplained weight loss
- Abnormally frequent urination
- Thirstier than usual (because the body loses water from frequent urination)
- Blurred vision for no apparent reason
- Leg pain, knee pain
- Dry and itchy skin, which may be itchy all over the body or around the vagina.
- I often get boils on my body.
- Mood swings, easily angered
- The wound heals slowly, does not dry completely, or scabs form.
Who is at risk of diabetes?
Diabetes is a disease that can be passed down through genetics. Therefore, those who have close relatives, such as parents, siblings, who have diabetes may have an increased risk of developing diabetes. If both parents have diabetes, the children will have a 50 percent risk of developing diabetes.
In addition to genetics, there are also lifestyle factors that may lead to diabetes, such as people who are overweight or obese, people who do not like to exercise, and people with high blood fat. These groups of people are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, while everyone has an equal chance of developing type 1 diabetes.
What factors increase the risk of developing diabetes?
There are many risk factors that cause diabetes. Some of them are genetics that are passed down from generation to generation, and some are lifestyle factors that we may not pay attention to or forget. Let’s see what these factors are.
Genetics As mentioned earlier, people whose immediate family members, whether father, mother, siblings, or siblings from the same womb, have diabetes, we who are the next generation have a higher risk of developing diabetes than the general population.
People who are obese and overweight have cells that become resistant to insulin.
Not exercising or exercising irregularly because exercise helps us control our weight. It also helps cells become more sensitive to the use of sugar and helps burn sugar in the blood well.
In terms of race, there is data showing that people of certain races are more likely to have diabetes than people of other races, such as Asians and blacks are more likely to have diabetes than people of other races.
Age: The older you get, the more likely you are to develop diabetes. This may be due to a decline in pancreatic cell function or lack of exercise.
High blood fat
Having high blood pressure
Complications caused by diabetes
Diabetes is considered a chronic disease that changes the walls of blood vessels, causing the blood vessels to harden or narrow. If the blood vessels in any part of the body are hard or narrow, it will cause disease in that organ. As can be seen, diabetes is the starting point that causes complications in every system, including the nervous system, eyes, kidneys, kidneys, heart and blood vessels, skin and mouth, etc.
Symptoms of diabetes
If we talk about the overall symptoms of people with diabetes, they will urinate frequently, lose weight, feel hungry often, and sometimes feel tired due to high blood sugar. Now, let’s take a deeper look at what other symptoms people with diabetes will show.
In general people who do not have diabetes, before eating breakfast, the blood sugar level will be only 70 – 110 mg.%. About 2 hours after eating breakfast, the blood sugar level will not exceed 140 mg.%. Those with low sugar levels may not show any symptoms. Diagnosis of diabetes is done by taking blood. Symptoms that are often found are as follows:
Normal people who are not diabetic usually do not get up to urinate in the middle of the night or urinate no more than once. When the blood sugar level is over 180 mg%, sugar will be excreted in the urine, causing frequent urination and water loss. They may also find that their urine has ants crawling around it.
People with diabetes often feel thirsty because they need to replace the water that the body excretes through urine.
Feeling weak and losing weight because the body cannot use the sugar it has, so it breaks down the protein and fat.
Patients are often hungry and eat a lot. On the contrary, their weight will continuously decrease because the body cannot use sugar for energy. Therefore, it breaks down energy from fat and muscle protein instead.
Other symptoms that may occur include infection, slow healing of wounds, or itching in various parts of the body.
Itching of the skin, fungal infection, especially in the vagina of women. Other causes of itching may be due to excessively dry skin or skin inflammation.
Blurred vision, blurred vision that requires frequent changes in glasses. This may be due to changes in vision, such as nearsightedness, cataracts, or high blood sugar.
Numbness in various parts, loss of sensation, pain in the arms and legs, sexual dysfunction due to high blood sugar levels for a long time, causing nerve degeneration, easy wounds on the feet because of the lack of sensation.
Vomiting may occur.
When blood sugar levels are high and diabetes has been present for some time, complications may occur with small blood vessels called Microvacular. If these complications occur, it will cause kidney disease, diabetic retinopathy. In addition, if the large arteries become hardened. It is called Macrovascular, which will cause coronary artery disease, paralysis, narrowing of the arteries in the legs, and also cause inflammation of the peripheral nerves called Neuropathic. Which causes numbness in the legs, muscle weakness, and autonomic nerve degeneration.
If you have these symptoms, along with your eating habits that are not careful about starch and sugar, you may assume that you have a high chance of having diabetes. Therefore, you should see a doctor immediately for a detailed examination and further treatment.
How is diabetes diagnosed?
Initially, when we go to see a doctor, the doctor will start by asking about symptoms, medical history, and family members. Then, there will be a physical examination and blood test to check sugar levels. There are many ways to analyze sugar levels, as follows:
- Method 1: Check your blood sugar level at any time.
- Method 2: Test blood sugar levels after fasting for at least 8 hours.
- Method 3: Testing the response of insulin hormone to blood sugar levels
- Method 4: Average blood sugar test or hemoglobin A1C
If the patient does not have clear symptoms of diabetes. Such as extreme thirst, frequent and copious urination, or unexplained weight loss. All of the above tests need to be repeated at least once by one of the methods to confirm the diagnosis.