What is diabetes?
We have all heard the term diabetes many times. In Western medicine, diabetes is called sweet polyuria, and in Chinese medicine, diabetes is called hypochondriasis, which is a combination of wasting and thirst. In fact, from a medical point of view, diabetes has a definition: it is the result of a long-term combination of environmental and genetic factors.
It is a chronic systemic metabolic disease. When it comes to chronicity, it means that you can’t get well after getting it, and when it comes to systemic, it means that all parts of the body are affected. When it comes to metabolic diseases, there are many metabolic disorders, not only bad blood sugar, but also blood lipids, blood pressure, including electrolytes, including acute complications, and some acidosis, water metabolism disorders, and systemic metabolism disorders.
Its clinical manifestations probably include two aspects, one is the high blood sugar, urine sugar caused by the three more and one less, eat more, drink more, urinate more, weight loss. The other is the symptoms caused by complications, such as diabetic nephropathy and retinopathy.
What are the predisposing factors of diabetes mellitus?
The predisposing factors of diabetes are: infection, obesity, reduced physical activity, pregnancy and environmental factors.
1.Infection
Infections play a very important role in the development of diabetes, especially viral infections are the main triggering factors of type I diabetes. In animal studies, many viruses were found to cause isletitis and cause disease, including encephalitis virus. Myocarditis virus, Coxsackie B4 virus, etc. Viral infections can cause islet inflammation, leading to diabetes due to insufficient insulin secretion. In addition, the virus infection can also make the latent diabetes aggravated and become dominant diabetes.
2.Obesity
Most type I diabetes patients are obese. Obesity is another factor that induces diabetes. When obese, the number of insulin receptors on the membrane of fat cells and muscle cells decreases, and the affinity for insulin decreases, and the sensitivity of body cells to insulin decreases, resulting in the impaired utilization of sugar and the rise of blood sugar and diabetes.
3.Physical activity
The incidence of diabetes among farmers and miners in China is significantly lower than that of urban residents, which is presumed to be related to the fact that the urban population is less involved in physical activities. Increased physical activity can reduce or prevent obesity, thus increasing insulin sensitivity and enabling blood sugar to be utilized without diabetes. On the contrary, if physical activity is reduced, it can easily lead to obesity, and reduce the sensitivity of tissue cells to insulin, and blood glucose utilization is blocked, which can lead to diabetes.
4.Pregnancy
During pregnancy, estrogen increases, and estrogen can induce autoimmunity and lead to the destruction of pancreatic beta cells on the one hand, and on the other hand, estrogen has the effect of counteracting insulin, therefore, multiple pregnancies can induce diabetes.
5.Environmental factors
On the basis of heredity, environmental factors play a very important role in the development of diabetes as causative factors. Environmental factors include: air pollution, noise, social competition, etc. These factors induce genetic mutations, and the mutated genes grow with the severity and duration of the above factors, and diabetes occurs when the mutated genes reach a certain level (i.e., the medical term “threshold”).
Who is at risk of developing diabetes?
1. Family members who are related to the person with diabetes.
2. Women who have a history of delivering a large fetus (i.e., a newborn weighing more than 4 kg) or who have had gestational diabetes.
3, obese people.
4, hypertension, hyperlipidemia (mainly refers to hypertriglyceridemia).
5. Those who have a history of hyperglycemia or positive urine sugar.
6.After the age of 40, those with low physical activity, good nutritional status, heavy workload or mental stress. These high-risk groups threatened by diabetes are very prone to develop diabetes if they do not have a good lifestyle. What can you do to minimize your risk of getting diabetes? The internationally accepted measures to prevent diabetes are at least “four points”, namely “learn more, eat less, move more, and relax more.
Learn more: Read more books, newspapers and TV about diabetes and listen to more lectures and broadcasts about diabetes to increase your basic knowledge about diabetes and how to prevent and treat it.
Eat less: Reduce your daily calorie intake, especially avoid eating and drinking a lot, fatty, sweet and heavy food, smoking and drinking, etc.
Move more often: Increase your physical activity time and exercise to keep your body fit and avoid obesity.
Take it easy: try to be cheerful, open-minded, optimistic, combine work and rest, and avoid excessive stress and strain.
How to detect diabetes at an early stage?
Early detection and prevention of diabetes is the key to longevity for diabetics. In the early stage of diabetes, the typical symptoms of “three more and one less”, such as drinking more, eating more, urinating more and losing weight, do not necessarily appear, because the appearance of typical symptoms means that the disease is long and heavy. This is especially true for type 2 diabetes. Therefore, people with suspected diabetes, such as obesity, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, pruritus, untreated sores and sores, and wasting without any discomfort, should go to the hospital for blood glucose examination to avoid delaying the disease.
How to detect diabetes early should be noted from the following aspects.
1. Family history of diabetes, middle-aged and old people, obese people, people with hypertension, and people with high blood pressure are all susceptible factors of diabetes. People with these conditions should have regular checkups at hospitals for early detection of diabetes.
2. Diabetes should also be suspected in the following cases.
Diabetes does not necessarily have the typical symptoms of “three more or less”, especially type II diabetes, so the following conditions should be considered if they are related to diabetes.
(1) A family history of diabetes. A clear family history of mild diabetes has a high probability of type 2 diabetes and should be noted.
② A history of abnormal childbirth. Such as a history of unexplained multiple miscarriages, stillbirths, stillbirths, premature births, malformed or large babies, etc.
③ Recurrent infections. Those with persistent vulvar itching, or recurrent vulvar or vaginal mycotic infections, or repeated sores and canker sores, may be diabetic patients. Many female patients are found to be diabetic by visiting gynecology for itchy vulva
④ Impotence. Male patients with impotence should be suspected of having diabetes mellitus after localized lesions of the genitourinary tract have been excluded.
⑤ having polyuria, thirst, excessive drinking, or having recent unexplained weight loss.
(vi) Those who occasionally have positive urine sugar but normal fasting glucose should also be suspected of having diabetes mellitus and should undergo further examination.
(7) Reactive hypoglycemia. It mostly occurs 3 hours or more after meal, manifested as panic, hunger, sweating, trembling, etc. Blood loose may be at or below the normal low value, and may be present in the early stage of certain obese type 2 diabetes.
(8) Young patients with arteriosclerosis, coronary artery disease, and fundus lesions should be suspected of having diabetes.
Atypical symptoms of diabetes mellitus.
Who must be alert to diabetes?
In recent years, the number of diabetic patients in China is increasing at an alarming rate. From less than 1% in the early 1980s, it has risen to 2.5% now, with more than 5% of people over 60 years of age being diabetic patients. It is conservatively estimated that there are more than 20 million people with type 2 diabetes in China, and if not effectively controlled, China will become the country with the largest number of diabetic patients in the world.
The typical symptoms of diabetes are “three more and one less”, but more than 50% of type 2 diabetic patients often have no clinical symptoms and are only occasionally detected during physical examinations, and some are found to have diabetes when they seek medical attention with atypical clinical symptoms, including: weakness, recurrent infections, long-lasting wounds, itchy skin, especially vulvar itch in women, and abnormal skin sensation in the extremities (e.g., itchy skin). The symptoms of diabetes include: weakness, recurrent infections, prolonged healing of wounds, skin itching, especially vulvar itching in women, abnormal skin sensation in the limbs (such as numbness, pins-and-needles pain, sensation of ants crawling on the skin surface), decreased vision, and sexual dysfunction.