Diabetes: Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment, and Prevention

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Among the common chronic health conditions diabetes. Diabetes is a metabolic condition that affects your blood sugar levels. Insulin hormone in your body helps in the conversion of blood sugars to energy. When you have diabetes mellitus, your body is incapable of making enough insulin or utilize the available one.

Chronic diabetes mellitus has no cure. However, your doctor can recommend management techniques to reduce the risk of complications. Some of the complication associated with diabetes include:

• Loss of vision
• Acute or chronic kidney failure
• Nerve damage

There are two common types of diabetes, which include:

• Type 1 diabetes, which is associated with a lack of insulin production due to damage pancreatic cells
• Type 2 diabetes, which occurs when your body becomes resistant to insulin, causing sugar build up in your blood

Other types of diabetes include prediabetes and gestational diabetes. Prediabetes is similar to type 2 diabetes. However, the blood sugar levels are not as high as in type 2 diabetes. On the other hand, gestational diabetes is a condition that occurs during pregnancy. The placenta can produce insulin-blocking hormones, causing this type of diabetes mellitus.

Signs and Symptoms

Signs and symptoms can vary between women and men. However, there are common signs of diabetes mellitus in both genders, which include:

• Loss of weight
• Frequent urination
• Increase in hunger and thirst
• Sores that take long or don’t heal
• Fatigue and general body weakness
• Blurry vision

Men with diabetes might have erectile dysfunction, low sex drive, and poor muscle strength. On the other hand, women with diabetes might portray symptoms such as dry and itchy skin, urinary tract, and yeast infections.  In case you experience such symptoms, you can contact any of our primary care physicians at 20874.

Signs and Symptoms

For effective diabetes mellitus management, your doctor will recommend diagnostics. During diabetes diagnostics, the physician can review your family’s diabetic history and the warning signs. To confirm the diagnosis, your doctor might recommend the following tests:

• Glucose screening test
• Random blood test
• Fasting blood sugar test
• Glucose tolerance test

Diabetes Mellitus Management

Diabetes mellitus treatment guidelines vary depending on the type. However, most treatments for diabetes are medications. Diabetes medications can be oral or injections.

Type 1 Diabetes

After diagnosing type 1 diabetes, your doctor will recommend insulin. Insulin will replace the hormone that the body can’t produce.

However, there are four types of insulin, depending on the period of action. Below are the four different types of insulin:

• Rapid-acting insulin. This type of insulin works in fifteen minutes, and its effects can last up to three hours.
• Short-acting insulin. The short-acting insulin acts in 30 minutes and stays for 6-8 hours.
• Intermediate–acting insulin. It starts working after two or three hours. However, the insulin can last for 12-18 hours in your body.
• Long-acting insulin. When you use such a type of insulin, it takes a few hours to start working. However, the effects of long-acting insulin can last a whole day or more.

Type 2 Diabetes

To treat non-insulin-dependent diabetes, our Germantown primary care physicians can recommend diet and lifestyle changes. Regular exercise can help in the consumption of glucose to produce energy and prevent type 2 diabetes complications.

If lifestyle and diet changes don’t work, your doctor might recommend medications. There are several types of diabetes medications. Therefore, you might need to take more than one type of medication. However, some type 2 diabetes patients can use insulin.  For prediabetes and gestational diabetes, you can make lifestyle and diet changes.

Diabetes Prevention

Type 1 diabetes is unpreventable since it is an autoimmune condition. Also, you might not have control over type 2 diabetes since some of the causes are genes and age. However, if you have prediabetes, you can prevent type 2 diabetes.

In our primary care clinic, we believe in prevention than cure. Therefore, Dr. Lakhvinder Wadhwa recommends the following to prevent type 2 diabetes if you already have prediabetes.

• Physical exercise for at least 150 minutes every week
• Cut refined, trans, and refined fats out of your diet
• Increase fruits and vegetables in your diet
• Consume your food in small portions
• Lose some of your bodyweight if you are obese or overweight

For more guidelines on the prevention and management of diabetes mellitus, you can visit us at Germantown Primary Health Care.