Diabetes And Blood Sugar: When To Go To The Hospital

Diabetes and blood sugar: When to go to the hospital

Keeping your blood sugar levels under control can be tough.
There are so many factors that can affect blood sugar, like exercise, food, illness, exhaustion and stress. Any of these can cause your careful control to go right out the window.
So how do you know if your loss of control is an emergency?
Hypoglycemia
Hypoglycemia is the condition of having too little glucose in the blood, usually below 70 mg/dl. It can result from taking too much insulin, not eating, illness or exercise. Hypoglycemia, sometimes called insulin shock or insulin reaction, can cause serious physical and mental changes.
Symptoms and Risks
Physical changes include shakiness, sweating, chills and feeling clammy, increased heart rate, dizziness, blurred vision, headache, weakness or excessive fatigue, tingling and numbness in the lips or tongue, lack of coordination, nausea and, in worst cases, seizures and unconsciousness.
Mental changes include confusion and delirium, anger, stubbornness and sadness. On occasion, someone who is suffering an episode of hypoglycemia might be mistaken for being extremely drunk.
All of the symptoms above are preliminary to passing out and/or entering a coma state, if left untreated.
The danger in hypoglycemia is the risk of accidental injury, including crashing the car while driving, falling down stairs, and so forth. The other risk is the inability of the patient to respond to the symptoms they are experiencing, which results in taking no action to reverse the condition. While rare, severe hypoglycemia, left untreated, can result in death.
What to Do
If the diabetic is co Continue reading

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Why Is My Diabetes Making Me So Tired?

Diabetes and fatigue are often discussed as a cause and effect. In fact, if you have diabetes, you’re more than likely going to experience fatigue at some point. However, there may be much more to this seemingly simple correlation.
About 2.5 million people in the United States have chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). CFS is marked by ongoing fatigue that significantly disrupts everyday life. People with this type of extreme fatigue use up their energy sources without necessarily being active. Walking to your car, for example, can zap all your energy. It’s thought that CFS is related to inflammation that disrupts your muscle metabolites.
Diabetes, which affects your blood sugar (glucose) and the production of insulin by the pancreas, can also have inflammatory markers. A wealth of studies have looked at the possible connections between diabetes and fatigue.
It can be challenging to treat both diabetes and fatigue. However, there are numerous options that can help. You may first need to see your doctor to determine the exact cause of your fatigue.
There are numerous studies connecting diabetes and fatigue. One such study looked at the results of a survey on sleep quality. Researchers reported that 31 percent of people with type 1 diabetes had poor sleep quality. The prevalence was slightly larger in adults who had type 2 diabetes, at 42 percent.
According to another study from 2015, about 40 percent of people with type 1 diabetes have fatigue longer than six months. The authors also noted that the fatigue is often so severe that it impacts everyday tasks as well as quality of Continue reading

Is Milk Bad for You? Diabetes and Milk

Is cow’s milk good food for people, especially people with diabetes? The American Diabetes Association (ADA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) say yes. Given how I feel about ADA and USDA’s record on nutrition advice, I think we should check for ourselves.
ADA recommends two to three servings of low-fat milk (or other low-fat dairy food such as cheese and yogurt) each day. “Including sources of dairy products in your diet is an easy way to get calcium and high-quality protein,” according to their nutrition page.
USDA says three cups a day for people age nine and up. But what do independent experts say? And what does the data say?
Many disagree about milk’s being healthy. Dr. Mark Hyman, author of The Blood Sugar Solution, wrote,
“I typically advise most of my patients to avoid dairy products completely… From an evolutionary point of view, milk is a strange food for humans. Until 10,000 years ago we didn’t domesticate animals and weren’t able to drink milk… The majority of humans naturally stop producing significant amounts of lactase — the enzyme needed to [deal with] lactose, the sugar in milk — sometime between the ages of two and five.”
OK. So some experts disagree with the government. But we have to start at the beginning. What is milk anyway?
What milk is made of
Milk is food produced by mammal mothers to feed their young. Mammal milks are all similar, but they have important differences in the specific proteins. It may be that cow’s milk is not a good match for most human populations.
Milk has significant amounts of fat, protein Continue reading

Type 2 Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes occurs mostly in people aged over 40 years. However, an increasing number of younger people, even children, are being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
The first-line treatment is diet, weight control and physical activity. If the blood sugar (glucose) level remains high despite these measures then tablets to reduce the blood glucose level are usually advised. Insulin injections are needed in some cases. Other treatments include reducing blood pressure if it is high, lowering high cholesterol levels and also using other measures to reduce the risk of complications.
Although diabetes cannot be cured, it can be treated successfully. If a high blood sugar level is brought down to a normal level, your symptoms will ease.
You still have some risk of complications in the long term if your blood glucose level remains even mildly high - even if you have no symptoms in the short term. However, studies have shown that people who have better glucose control have fewer complications (such as heart disease or eye problems) compared with those people who have poorer control of their glucose level.
Therefore, the main aims of treatment are:
To keep your blood glucose level as near normal as possible.
To reduce any other risk factors that may increase your risk of developing complications. In particular, to lower your blood pressure if it is high and to keep your blood lipids (cholesterol) low.
To detect any complications as early as possible. Treatment can prevent or delay some complications from becoming worse.
Type 2 diabetes is usually initially treated by following a hea Continue reading

Type 2 Diabetes

More than 30 million Americans have diabetes (about 1 in 10), and 90% to 95% of them have type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes most often develops in people over age 45, but more and more children, teens, and young adults are also developing it.
Causes
Insulin is a hormone made by your pancreas that acts like a key to let blood sugar into the cells in your body for use as energy. If you have type 2 diabetes, cells don’t respond normally to insulin; this is called insulin resistance. Your pancreas makes more insulin to try to get cells to respond. Eventually your pancreas can’t keep up, and your blood sugar rises, setting the stage for prediabetes and type 2 diabetes. High blood sugar is damaging to the body and can cause other serious health problems, such as heart disease, vision loss, and kidney disease.
Symptoms & Risk Factors
Type 2 diabetes symptoms often develop over several years and can go on for a long time without being noticed (sometimes there aren’t any noticeable symptoms at all). Because symptoms can be hard to spot, it’s important to know the risk factors for type 2 diabetes and to see your doctor to get your blood sugar tested if you have any of them.
Getting Tested
A simple blood test will let you know if you have diabetes. If you’ve gotten your blood sugar tested at a health fair or pharmacy, follow up at a clinic or doctor’s office to make sure the results are accurate.
Management
Unlike many health conditions, diabetes is managed mostly by you, with support from your health care team (including your primary care doctor, foot doctor, dentist, eye Continue reading