World Diabetes Day 2019: 7 Warning Signs Of Diabetes You Must Know

With 415 million sufferers, diabetes is the leading cause of ailments like kidney failure, limb amputations and adult blindness. In the last two decades, the number of diabetics worldwide has more than doubled.

This year’s theme for World Diabetes Day is Family and Diabetes and families are urged to learn more about the warning signs of the disease and find out if they are at risk of becoming a diabetic. Estimates suggest that one in 11 adults worldwide are diabetic and about one in two of them have been undiagnosed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that about 7.2 million individuals remain undiagnosed.

Diabetes is a condition that gradually progresses over time and when left untreated, high blood sugar can affect several organs in your body. Complications of untreated diabetes include kidney damage leading to dialysis, vision problems, heart diseases, stroke and chronic conditions like neuropathy and gastroparesis.

Below are the important warning signs of diabetes:

1. Excessive thirst: This is one of the most common warning signs of diabetes. When your blood sugar levels rise, it causes thirst which is exacerbated by frequent urination. Quite often, you might find that drinking water doesn’t seem to quench your thirst.

2. Frequent urination or Polyuria: This is a typical sign that your blood sugar levels are elevated enough to spill into your urine. This is because your kidneys will be unable to keep up with the amount of glucose and let it go into your urine. Thereby, you tend to urinate often, especially at night.

3. Repeated skin infections: Elevated blood sugar levels can make it harder for your body to fight off an infection. Women might have frequent vaginal yeast or bladder infection because the bacteria can flourish when there is a lot of glucose in the blood.

4. Impaired wound healing: If you are diabetic, your elevated blood sugar levels tend to narrow your blood vessels which affect your blood circulation and restrict oxygen and nutrients from getting to your wounds. And high blood sugar for a prolonged period can also impair your immune system, giving your body a harder time to fight infection.

5. Fatigue: Your body isn’t getting adequate energy from the food you eat and you end up feeling constantly tired. Both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes can make you feel hungrier and more tired than usual.

6. Blurry vision: This could be experienced early in unmanaged diabetes. Suddenly elevated blood sugar levels can affect the blood vessels in your eyes and cause the fluid to seep into the lens leading to blurry vision. With prolonged undiagnosed diabetes, your risk for serious conditions like diabetes retinopathy is higher.

7. Increased hunger or polyphagia: This is one of the important early signs of diabetes. Your body uses all the glucose in your blood to feed your cells and when this system gets interrupted, your cells will stop absorbing the glucose. As a result, you will start looking for more energy, and you end up feeling excessively hungry.