The main symptoms of diabetes mellitus
Polyuria: Patients with diabetes mellitus have an increased urine output, which can reach 3,000 to 4,000 milliliters per day and night, up to 10,000 milliliters or more. The frequency of urination also increases, and some patients can urinate more than 20 times a day. Because of high blood sugar, the body can not be fully utilized. In particular, the glomerular filtration is not completely reabsorbed by the renal tubules, resulting in osmotic diuresis. The higher the blood sugar, the more urine, the more sugar is excreted, and so on in a vicious circle.
Drinking more: Due to excessive urination, too much water is lost and intracellular dehydration occurs, stimulating the thirst center to drink water as a supplement. Therefore, the more you urinate, the more you drink, forming a positive relationship.
Excessive food: Due to excessive sugar loss in urine, such as losing more than 500 grams of sugar per day, the body is in a semi-starvation state, lack of energy causes hyperphagia, increased food intake, increased blood sugar, increased urine sugar, and so on repeatedly.
Wasting: As the body cannot make full use of glucose, fat and protein decomposition is accelerated and consumed excessively, and weight loss occurs, resulting in wasting of the body.
Weakness: Due to the disorder of metabolism, energy cannot be released normally, tissue cells lose water and electrolytes are abnormal, so the patient feels weak and mentally unstable.
Atypical symptoms of diabetes mellitus
Due to insufficient insulin or insulin resistance, glucose intake cannot be fully utilized by the body, and a series of metabolic disorders, mainly hyperglycemia, will occur in diabetic patients. Among them, the most common and typical symptoms are “three more and one less”, i.e. drinking more, urinating more, eating more and losing weight. These symptoms are familiar to everyone and are one of the important bases for clinical diagnosis of diabetes. However, it is not always possible to use the “three more and one less” as a yardstick to apply diabetes. Sometimes, diabetic patients can have no symptoms at all, and sometimes, they only have a few atypical symptoms; however, these “atypical” symptoms are often an important cause of misdiagnosis and underdiagnosis of diabetes and even aggravation of the disease.
Abnormal vision: Significantly reduced vision, easy eye fatigue when reading books and newspapers, darkness in front of the eyes when standing up, narrowing of vision. These symptoms may be the manifestation of diabetes-induced visual impairment, retinal hemorrhage, cataract, visual regulation disorder, etc. The sudden appearance of drooping eyelids on one side in older adults may also be caused by diabetes, as diabetes can lead to arteriosclerosis, resulting in ischemia of the small blood vessels supplying the eyelid nerves, which can lead to nerve dysfunction and result in drooping eyelids.
Thirst: The first symptom that appears in the early stages of diabetes is thirst. The thirst is caused by elevated blood sugar, but because it is early in the course of diabetes, the patient’s elevated blood sugar is not yet pronounced enough, so water consumption may not increase.
Hunger: Patients experience “hypoglycemic symptoms” such as panic attacks, cold sweats, and hand tremors, and these abnormal symptoms are often a sign that diabetes is on its way. This is because in the early stages of diabetes, in order to cope with the elevated blood sugar, the body will deploy more insulin to “help”, but at this time, the rise in blood sugar is not obvious, which causes a relative increase in insulin, but will lower blood sugar. Although it is the performance of hypoglycemia, the patient still has diabetes.
Fatigue: Diabetic patients are easily fatigued, even without labor or sports, their bodies will feel exhausted for no reason, their legs are weak and their knees are sore, especially when going up and down stairs. This is due to the impaired metabolism of the three major energy substances of sugar, protein and fat in diabetic patients.
Decreased libido: Male patients have decreased libido for no reason, or even sexual dysfunction such as impotence; female patients have menstrual disorders such as irregular menstruation or amenorrhea, which may also be early symptoms in diabetic patients, caused by diabetes affecting the blood vessels and nerves of the patient’s reproductive system together.
Skin disease: diabetic patients often itch due to weakened skin resistance, female patients sometimes itch and pubic area, if the skin is injured, easy to infect decay, and also grow scabies.
Difficulty in urination: When symptoms such as low urination and prolonged time between urination occur, you may have diabetes. According to statistics, the first symptom of some sugar lovers is difficulty in urination. This is because diabetes can affect the urinary nerves of the body’s bladder.
Delivery of a huge baby: The concentration of glucose in the blood of diabetic women increases, and the glucose may enter the fetus through the placenta, stimulating the fetal islet function, secreting a large amount of insulin, making full use of the glucose in the blood, promoting the synthesis of fat and protein, and accelerating the growth and development of the fetus, so the fetus is huge, often over 4 kg. The atypical symptoms of diabetes can often be seen in other non-diabetic conditions, so it is easy for diabetic patients to ignore them and not consider them as diabetes, which prevents them from detecting their diabetes in time. type 2 diabetes often starts with these atypical symptoms. Studies have shown that most of the many people with type 2 diabetes do not realize they have diabetes in the early stages of the disease. By the time they find out they have diabetes, they have actually had it for several years.
Early symptoms of diabetes
Some people do not know enough about diabetes to be unaware that they have it. Therefore, it is recommended that middle-aged people over the age of 40 should have an annual physical examination to screen for diabetes, and people at high risk for diabetes should have a C-peptide test every six months. According to pathological analysis, early detection, diagnosis and prevention of diabetes can effectively prevent the disease from entering the high-risk stage. When there are obvious symptoms of “three more and one less”, treatment can be quite difficult. Therefore, symptoms should be carefully observed to facilitate prevention and treatment.
Occasional hypoglycemia: frequent panic, hand tremor, unbearable hunger, excessive sweating, rapid heart rate, etc., 2 to 3 hours after meals; symptoms specific to female diabetic patients: female vulvar itching or urinary tract infection recurrent or untreated; symptoms of diabetes in the lower extremities: no obvious reason for lower extremity pain, weakness or itchy skin; patients at high risk of diabetes: middle-aged people over 40 years old, obese people, weight Index BMI>24, significant lipid abnormalities; premature occurrence of atherosclerosis and hypertension; middle-aged people with complications of diabetes: such as coma of unknown cause, hypertension, coronary heart disease, myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, etc.
Why some glucose patients have no symptoms
Not all sugar lovers have obvious symptoms or atypical symptoms, the main reasons for this situation are.
1, blood sugar is high to a certain level before diabetes symptoms appear. It has been found that only when the blood sugar level is higher than 15mmol/L for a period of time, the clinical symptoms of diabetes such as “three more and one less” will appear, and the blood sugar standard for diagnosing diabetes may be much lower than this value.
2.Insensitive to high blood sugar response. Some people, especially the elderly, may be less sensitive to hyperglycemia, and their blood sugar is already very high, but they do not feel anything clinically. For example, some people have elevated renal sugar threshold, and although they are already sugar lovers, they feel nothing because they do not have much urine sugar.
3. Lack of diabetes knowledge. Some people do not know anything about diabetes, although they have the symptoms of “three more and one less” but do not recognize it, and still think that they can eat and drink well. This can easily lead to misdiagnosis, which can lead to misunderstanding of the disease.