Diabetes Education: Signs and Symptoms
In America today, 23.6 million people — 7.8 percent of the population — have diabetes, and 24 percent of them don’t even know they have the disease. Approximately 90 percent of those 23.6 million diabetics have type 2 diabetes. In addition, another 57 million have prediabetes, a condition that, if it goes untreated, can develop into type 2 diabetes. These are startling statistics. The bad news is that the incidence of newly diagnosed cases of diabetes, especially type 2 diabetes, is rising. The good news is that diabetes education can help lower those statistics. One element of diabetic education that’s important is how to recognize the signs and symptoms of diabetes.
Type 1 Diabetes, Type 2 Diabetes and Prediabetes
Because they lack diabetes education, many people think diabetes is all about sugar. Actually, diabetes is all about insulin, a hormone that allows the cells in your body to absorb the sugar in your blood. In type 1 diabetes, your body stops producing insulin. In type 2 diabetes, your cells develop a resistance to insulin. The results from both types of diabetes is that excess sugar is left in your blood, which raises your blood sugar level and brings on diabetes.
In prediabetes, your blood sugar level is higher than normal but too low to be classified as diabetic. Diabetes education is particularly important for detecting prediabetes, because type 2 diabetes is preventable. If you can be diagnosed as prediabetic early enough, you can take steps to lower your blood sugar level and hopefully avert the disease.
Signs and Symptoms of Diabetes
In type 1 diabetes, the signs and symptoms come on suddenly, sometimes within hours or a couple of days. In type 2 diabetes, they develop gradually over the course of several years. Because the signs and symptoms are subtle, you might not notice them unless you learned about them through diabetes education. In many cases, the signs and symptoms are similar:
|
Signs and Symptoms of Diabetes |
|
|
Type 1 |
Type 2 |
| Frequent urination | Frequent urination |
| Frequent thirst | Frequent thirst |
| Extreme hunger | Extreme hunger |
| Losing weight suddenly, sometimes even when your appetite has increased | Losing weight gradually, even though your appetite has increased |
| Being weak and tired constantly | Being weak and tired constantly |
| Being irritable | Being irritable |
| Having blurred vision | |
| Getting cuts and bruises that heal slowly | |
| Having tingling sensations in your hands and feet | |
| Having skin, gum or bladder infections that keep recurring | |
By teaching you what signs and symptoms to look for, diabetes education helps you recognize type 1 and type 2 diabetes early enough to do something about it before the condition worsens.
Tags: diabetes education, diabetes signs, Diabetes Symptoms, diabetic education, prediabetes, Type 1 diabetes, Type 2 diabetes
