Understanding Diabetes:

Diabetes is a medical condition that requires treatment throughout one’s life. This disease affects the way in which your body breaks up glucose, which is a kind of sugar, in your blood. In India, roughly 5 percent of the country’s population currently suffer from diabetes. Let us look at this medical condition in a bit more detail:

Causes of Diabetes:

In the human body, your pancreas creates a hormone called insulin. This hormone allows your cells to turn glucose from the food you eat into energy. Diabetes, however, prevents your cells from absorbing insulin in the right quantities and thus leaves your cells unable from turning the glucose created from being converted into energy. Most doctors may also refer to this condition as insulin resistance. While your body’s pancreas will initially try to compensate for this by making more insulin, eventually, your body will not be able to keep up, resulting in the build-up of sugar in your blood instead.

In adults, the most common instance of diabetes is called Type 2 Diabetes. The causes of this medical condition include:

• Genetics: Medical studies have shown that different parts of your body’s DNA affect the way your body produces insulin.

• Excess Weight: Patients who are either overweight or obese may suffer from insulin resistance.

• Metabolic Syndrome: Patients suffering from insulin resistance may also be susceptible to other conditions, which can include high blood glucose, excessive weight around the waist, high blood pressure or even high cholesterol.

• Excessive glucose in the liver: patients who suffer from low blood sugar can also develop diabetes, as their liver continue to create glucose and sugar, which continually gets added to their blood stream.

• Miscommunication between cells: In certain cases, the patient’s body cells send across the wrong signal, or do not pick up the right message. This results in the cells in the patient’s body being unable to correctly make or use insulin and glucose, which in turn can lead to diabetes.

Common Symptoms Of Diabetes:

In most cases, diabetes does not exhibit any noticeable signs, or signs that are clearly noticeable. However, some of the more common signs, that can indicate that you are suffering from diabetes, includes:

• Consistently feeling very thirsty, despite drinking water.
• Excessive urination
• Blurry or unclear vision
• Behavioural shifts, including sudden and inexplicable irritation
• Numbness or a tingling feeling in your hands or feet
• Excessive and inexplicable fatigue
• Festering wounds that do not heal

Consequences of Diabetes:

In the long term, Diabetes can have a massive impact on your body. This medical condition can result in excessively high blood sugar, which can cause problems for your heart and blood vessels, your kidneys, your eyes, pregnancy, and your nerves, which are directly responsible for your digestion, the feeling in your feet and your sexual response.

Diagnosis & Prevention:

There is no long term treatment for diabetes. This condition can either be prevented, or arrested throughout life. While diagnosing this condition, your doctor will run routine blood tests for signs of diabetes. In most cases, the medical team will run more than one type of test to confirm the diagnosis. If your blood glucose level is excessively high, or you are displaying more than one potential symptom of diabetes, they may feel the need for only one test.

The most common tests that are conducted to ascertain the presence of diabetes includes:

A1C: This test helps to take an average of your blood glucose levels over a fixed period of time, ideally over a span of 2-3 months.

Fasting Plasma Glucose: This test helps to measure your blood sugar level on an empty stomach. You will be required to fast for a period of 8 hours before the test.

Oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT): This test is done to ascertain how your body handles sugar by checking your blood glucose before and two hours after you drink a sweet drink.

Preventing & Management of Diabetes: The best way to prevent the onset of diabetes is to make conscious lifestyle changes. This includes forsaking habits like smoking, getting enough exercise, reducing stress and sleeping enough to get the right amount of rest.

Once diagnosed with diabetes, it is important to focus on the present, and do as much as you can to have a healthy lifestyle. It is essential that you take the prescribed medication at the right time, and follow your doctor’s instructions to life healthy.

The Apollo Clinic Experience:

Type 2 Diabetes is a life-changing threat, which can only be arrested and reduced over time. With the help of our world-class team of diabetologists, we ensure that you get the best treatment, which will help to arrest and lower your blood sugar levels, and also reduce the threat that this medical condition can pose to your lifestyle and well-being. If you feeling that you are suffering from the symptoms of diabetes, get in touch with one of our experts at the earliest to get timely preventive measures started, and treatment procedures, if needed.