
Regaining Your Energy With Type 2 Diabetes: Tips to Prevent Fatigue
No, it's not your imagination: Taking care of yourself when you have type 2 diabetes can be exhausting. Diabetes-related fatigue is common, and you may be feeling it from a variety of sources — your type 2 diabetes symptoms themselves, exhaustion from the responsibilities of managing diabetes daily, ineffective diabetes management, or even from other underlying conditions.
Understanding Diabetes-Related Fatigue
There are strong associations between diabetes and testosterone levels, kidney disease, and other health complications, all of which can cause you to become very tired, says Ronald Tamler, MD, medical director of the Mount Sinai Clinical Diabetes Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. There’s also a link between diabetes and depression, he adds, and depression is a common cause of extreme fatigue.
According to a study published in June 2014 in the journal Current Diabetes Report, depressive symptoms affect up to one-third of people with diabetes. The research also found that depression not only impairs quality of life but also adds to the difficulties experienced in diabetes self-management.
"The research highlights a wide range of potential explanations for the association between diabetes and depression, which include having a sedentary lifestyle, eating a diet high in refined sugars, sleeping poorly, and experiencing brain dysfunction due to low and high blood sugars, as well as chronic inflammation that is associated with diabetes," says David Lam, MD, associate director of the Mount Sinai Diabetes Center at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
Continue
reading