I really someone to tell me the signs and symptoms of diabetes. One time when I was hyper from eating a lot of sweets my dad told me that hyperactivity is a sign of diabetes and I'm worried. Oh and I don't know the differerence between type 1 and type 2 diabetes so please give me some seroius answers. Diabetes does run in the family too. Type one diabetes you are born with.
Type two diabetes you aquire from being overweight, the decrease of your pancreas activity, or other means.
Hypoglycemia(low blood sugar) you will have be cold and clammy, possibly feel dizzy.
Hyperglycemia(high blood sugar) doesn't always have tell tale signs.
I would assume that if you were hyper after eating a lot of sugar it was not a diabetic attack.
If diabetes runs in your family you may want to talk to a doctor but if you are healthy and young you may not have diabetes. Just because something runs in your family doesn't mean you are going to get it. Go to www.webmd.com and type in diabetes. You will find everything you need to know there in much better detail than you will here. There are also lots of links to other sites. This is going to be a long answer, but then you asked a lot of questions!
Diabetes is when your body doesn't metabolize (burn) sugar well. Sugar builds up in your blood, which can cause problems.
When you eat something sweet (or something with carbohydrates, like bread or rice), they turn into glucose in your stomach. Glucose is the simplest form of sugar. This glucose goes into your blood and all the tissues in your body use it as fuel. When your body sees the glucose level rising in your blood, your pancreas makes insulin. Insulin is a hormone that the cells all through your body use to burn the sugar to make energy.
When you eat a lot of sugar all at once, say a candy bar or a can of soda, your pancreas suddenly pumps out a lot of insulin. If you're normal, your body burns up this sugar in about 20 minutes, but you still have all this insulin in your blood so you 'crash', you feel weak and shaky and hungry. This is not good for you. A can of soda is like 13 teaspoons of sugar!
Anyway, type 1 diabetes is what some people get in childhood (though you can get it as an adult, it's just not that common). What happens is that your body sees your pancreas as a foreign body and attacks it (through the 'autoimmune system'). The pancreas is damaged and makes less insulin, or it dies and makes no insulin at all. So you have to take insulin.
Type 2 diabetes usually you get when you're an adult. Your pancreas is fine, you have plenty of insulin, but your tissues are 'insulin resistant', and they don't metabolize enough sugar.
(There are other kinds besides Type 1 and Type 2, but they are more rare. There's something called 'gestational diabetes' that women get when they're pregnant, but it goes away after the baby is born.)
These are completely different diseases, but the effect is the same. Glucose builds up in your blood, and this can cause serious problems. Your blood gets thick and 'sticky', so you have circulation problems. You get numbness and tingling in your toes and fingers, like they're asleep, and this can actually get very painful (neuropathy). In some cases if you get a cut on your feet it won't heal and you get gangrene and you have to have your foot amputated! The narrowest capillaries in your body get plugged up, and these capillaries are found in your kidneys and the retinas of your eyes so you can get kidney failure (nephropathy) or you can go blind (retinopathy). And you can get 'hardening of the arteries' (atherosclerosis) so you are more likely to have a heart attack. In the US, diabetes is the biggest cause of blindness, amputation, and kidney failure!
The main symptom of diabetes is that you're thirsty all the time, because your body is trying to thin out your blood. You drink lots and lots but it doesn't quench your thirst. You pee a lot too (duh!). This is called 'polydipsia' (drinking a lot) and polyurea (peeing a lot). You can also feel tired all the time because your body is not burning its 'fuel'. But there are many other problems that cause these symptoms, so if you go to a doctor he will order a series of tests for other things besides diabetes.
You control diabetes through diet and exercise. You have to be careful about carbohydrates, not eat too many, and you get some exercise to help burn off excess glucose in your blood. Drugs help too, and there are several different kinds of drugs depending on what kind of diabetes you have and how bad it is.
If you have diabetes in your family you should get tested once in a while. This means getting a fasting blood test to see your fasting blood glucose level. There is another test where they give you some sugary stuff to drink and then test your blood every hour for several hours to see how well your body uses up the glucose (that's called a 'glucose tolerance test').
If you know someone who is diabetic, he will have a blood glucose meter and probably would be happy to test you. It is really a painless test, it only requires a tiny speck of blood from your forearm. Get tested in the morning before you eat (fasting) or 1 or 2 hrs after eating a big meal with lots of carbohydrates (pizza, pasta, a sandwich, etc) and you will see how well your body used up the sugar. This test can't tell you you are diabetic but it can rule it out. |
