What are the early warning signs of diabetes and do you recognize them?
- Frequent urination
- Weight loss
- Intense hunger
Diabetes is a preventable disease that affects many people, more than a quarter of which remain undiagnosed. With complications that include poor blood circulation, nerve damage, kidney damage, and even death, buying your medicine for diabetes from the best drugstores in the Philippines is a must.
Diabetes is a condition that makes it hard for the body to regulate glucose levels in the blood. This is something that is typically regulated by a hormone known as insulin but with diabetes, your body does not produce enough of the hormone, and the cells don’t respond correctly to insulin or a combination of both.
Keeping your blood sugar levels uncontrolled for a long time can lead to complications such as hearing impairment, skin problems, eye damage, and heart disease. Some of these complications can even lead to amputation, most commonly of the legs or feet.
Preventing this disease and the complications that come with it requires identifying the symptoms early. Do you recognize these 3 early warning signs of diabetes?
Frequent Urination
Frequent and/or excessive urination, or polyuria, can be a sign that your blood sugar levels are so high that it starts to spill into the urine. Your kidneys allow some of that sugar to go into the urine because they cannot keep up with the high glucose levels. There, the sugar draws additional water and makes you have to urinate more often.
Diabetes also causes your body to become less efficient at breaking down food into sugar and as a result, more sugar ends up in your bloodstream. Because your body tries to get rid of it by flushing it out in the urine, going to the bathroom a lot may be one of the early warning signs you are missing.
Most people don’t recognize that they use the bathroom often. Another red flag is when the need to urinate keeps you up at night. While urinating once or twice can be normal, it may be a diabetes symptom if it affects your ability to sleep.
Weight Loss
It might sound counterintuitive that losing weight could be one of the early warning signs of diabetes considering that being overweight is also a risk factor. Weight loss can come from two things: the water that you lose from urinating and the calories you lose in the urine when you don’t absorb all the calories from the sugar in your blood.
The body reacts as if it would be starving and starts using the protein from your muscles because insulin cannot get glucose into the cells. Rapid and unexplained weight loss of usually 10 to 20 pounds in a few months is not healthy and should require immediate attention.
Once people start controlling their blood sugar after learning they have diabetes, they may experience weight gain once again. This is a good sign because it means your blood sugars are becoming more balanced.
Intense Hunger
It is not uncommon for undiagnosed diabetes patients to suddenly feel hungry and reach for carbs. Increased hunger, or polyphagia, can also be an early warning sign of diabetes because your body uses the sugar in your blood to feed your cells. When the cells couldn’t absorb the sugar because of the lack of insulin, your body looks for more sources of fuel causing intense hunger.
Your body has a problem regulating its glucose when you have high blood sugar. If you eat something that is high in carbohydrates, your body produces a little too much insulin and your blood glucose drops quickly. This leads to a vicious cycle of highs and lows.
Key Takeaway
If you have any suspicions that you might be experiencing some of these early warning signs of diabetes, consult your doctor right away. Diabetes, when left untreated, can lead to lifelong impairment, or even death.
Reduced risk of complications and successful treatment depends on the swiftness and accuracy of the diagnosis.
By looking for the symptoms early, you can buy diabetes medicine from the best drugstores in the Philippines before it becomes too hard to manage.