Type 2 Diabetes: Are You at Risk? The (Symptomless) Condition

Find out if you are at risk for Diabetes – By the time symptoms of related conditions flair, irreversible damage often has occurred.

Sam had been feeling rundown for a while. His energy wasn’t what it used to be, and he found himself tired by the middle of the afternoon.

For some reason, he hadn’t been sleeping well. It might have been because he was getting up a couple of times in the middle of each night to use the bathroom. He needed to stop drinking so much water in the evening.

And he noticed his vision wasn’t what it used to be. He would need to see his eye doctor for some new glasses… as soon as he could make the time.

Sam guessed that this was what middle age was all about. After all, nothing had suddenly changed. He didn’t just wake up one day to find he wasn’t feeling well.

 

Over the last year or two, he had started to really feel his age. On the bright side, he’d managed to shed nearly 15 pounds over the last few months without really trying at all. His friends all said he was looking great.

But Sam was actually very sick – he just didn’t know it yet. He was showing all of the most common “symptoms” of diabetes: malaise (low energy); polyuria (frequent urination); polydipsia (excessive thirst) – along with blurry vision and unintentional weight loss.

Actually, that is only about half of the common symptom set, but before we go on, we need to be clear about one thing: Our statement is inaccurate. Actually, diabetes has no symptoms at all.

That’s right. All the symptoms Sam was experiencing are signs of hyperglycemia, elevated blood sugar that is a side effect of uncontrolled diabetes, not diabetes itself.

Diabetes is symptomless. So the symptoms of high blood glucose stand in proxy as symptoms of diabetes. To make matters worse, the symptoms of high blood sugar don’t become pronounced until blood sugars are critically high. And therein lies our problem.

By the time Sam was feeling these symptoms, his undiagnosed diabetes was raging out of control. The retinas in both of his eyes had already suffered permanent damage. His kidneys already were dumping microalbumin, the earliest stage of kidney damage.

And the stage had been set for neuropathy in his hands and feet: irreversible nerve damage caused by years of elevated glucose in his blood stream.

Years?
Yes, by the time the symptoms of high blood sugar become serious enough to drive most people to their doctors, sugar levels often have been elevated for over a decade.

So while it’s important to recognize the symptoms that warn that you could have diabetes, a better approach is to understand whether you are at risk for diabetes and proactively have yourself checked before you begin to feel like Sam did.

So Who’s at Risk?

How old are you?
The further into middle age you are, the higher your risk of Type 2 diabetes. 45 seems to be the magic age.

How fat are you?
The further above a healthy body mass index (BMI) you are, the higher your risk of Type 2 diabetes. And obesity can trigger diabetes at a younger age. Of course, thin people also can develop diabetes.

What color is your skin?
Medical statistics show that people who are Asian, black, Hispanic, Native American or East Indian are more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than Caucasians. But millions of white people also have diabetes.

Who are your parents?
If there is a family history of diabetes, your risk skyrockets. If either parent has diabetes, you have a 50% chance of developing it yourself. If both parents have it, you are at exceedingly high risk. Look deeper into your family tree. If aunts and uncles or grandparents have diabetes, your risk is higher. But if you have a diabetes-free family, you still could have other risk factors.

How active are you?
The amount of movement, or lack thereof, seems to be an independent risk factor for diabetes. That means regardless of all other risk factors, couch potatoes are at higher risk of diabetes than those who take their dogs (or grandchildren) for walks in the park.

The Symptoms of Elevated Blood Glucose

But what if you think you might have undiagnosed diabetes and that you have had it for several years? Your sugar already is dangerously high. What symptoms would you be feeling?

Excessive quantities of sugar in the body are poison and are corrosive to the body. Having elevated blood sugar is like having a mild battery acid in your bloodstream.

Some of the symptoms associated with high blood sugar are the result of damage to tissue, while others are associated with the body’s efforts to rid itself of the poison, and others are side effects of that effort.

The developing diabetes makes it impossible for the body to process glucose in the normal manner, and glucose in the blood builds up to dangerous levels.

Your body wants that sugar out. Like engineers trying to protect a dam from floodwaters, the body opens the sluice gates on the kidneys, starting a chain reaction of interrelated symptoms.

The first is excessive urination as the body tries to get rid of the sugar. Some people affected need to urinate every hour, all day long. The fluid loss can be epic. This leads to dehydration, triggering unquenchable thirst.

In a sad case of chicken and egg, many people, like Sam, discount the frequent urination as being the result of drinking too many fluids. But it’s the other way around – the excess urination triggers the thirst. The dehydration also can cause dry, itchy skin.

In addition to thirst and dry skin, the dehydration can cause transient blurry vision as the body loses enough fluid to cause the lenses of the eyes to dry out and warp out of shape. More ominously, if there are black splotches blocking your vision, it could be a sign of retinopathy – broken blood vessels in the back of the eye.

Meanwhile, with so much sugar exiting in the urine, the body can’t get enough fuel for day-to-day processes, so it burns fat reserves instead, leading to weight loss. Even when people eat hundreds of calories more per meal than they need to hold a steady weight under normal circumstances, they can shed pounds.

This inability to process the sugar in the blood – due to a combination of insulin resistance and insulin deficiency from the diabetes – also triggers hunger and leads to fatigue.

Nerve damage from long-term elevated blood sugar can cause a burning sensation in the toes and fingers or can lead to a loss of sensation in either or both. Damage to small blood vessels can make cuts, scrapes and wounds slow to heal.

Elevated blood sugars also can wreak havoc on the immune system, making it more likely you’ll catch every cold and flu bug that comes along, resulting in frequent illnesses.

High blood sugar also can make both yeast infections and urinary tract infections more common and more serious, especially in women. It also can cause erectile dysfunction in men.

Lastly, high blood sugar can lead to irritability and difficulty concentrating.

Most of these symptoms creep up a little at a time over weeks, months or even years. It can be hard to recognize them as warning signs that something dangerous is afoot. The gradual onset of this set of symptoms leads a great many people to write them off as part of the normal aging process.

Once treated and controlled, people often are stunned at how much younger they feel.

What Should You Do?

If you are experiencing any of these symptoms, especially if you’re experiencing more than one, see your doctor right away. Like Sam, if you can feel it, damage already has been done and you need to get the situation under control without delay.

Just as diabetes has no symptoms, it also causes no damage by itself. Well-controlled diabetes is the leading cause of absolutely nothing. It is high blood sugar from uncontrolled diabetes that causes “complications,” the horrible array of damaged body systems that lower quality of life for millions globally.

Even if there already has been some permanent damage, getting diabetes under control stops further damage, can reverse some kinds of damage and stops the uncomfortable symptoms of high blood sugar.

The Creeping Killer

Heart disease sometimes is called the “silent killer” because it remains undetectable by symptoms until a heart attack or stroke. Diabetes is similarly stealthy, but not entirely silent – more like a “creeping killer.” While it does not have symptoms of its own, it leaves tracks behind.

If you are at risk due to your age, weight, ethnicity, family history or low activity level, visit your doctor and get checked. The gold standard is the HbA1c test, which many doctors can run in as little as three minutes in their offices.

It gives a snapshot of the average blood sugar level for the last three months and is the test used to diagnose diabetes. If you are at risk, you should request this test annually.

Don’t delay like Sam. It might be that you are just feeling your age. Or it might be that you’re feeling the creeping killer.