Symptoms and Harms of Diabetes Mellitus

Symptoms and Harms of Diabetes Mellitus

Typical symptoms: Polydipsia, polyphagia, polyuria and weight loss, which are commonly known as "three polys and one little”. Meanwhile, patients also have other symptoms, such as drinking too much but always feeling thirsty, eating too much but still feeling weak.

Atypical symptoms: Symptoms of some patients with type II diabetes mellitus are not typical and they only feel dizzy, weak but have no symptom. Some patients may have  hypoglcemia symptoms before lunch or dinner.

Complications of diabetes mellitus:

Acute complications

Patients may have ketoacidosis and hyperosmolar coma and main manifestations include obvious aggravation of polydipsia and polyuria become worse obviously, frequent nausea and vomiting, abdominal pain and eating less. Acute complications are serious complications with high fatality rate. Moreover, acute complications are easy to recur. (Notes: type I diabetes mellitus is easy to occur.)

Chronic complications

1. Retinopathy: Patients can’t see things clearly and have the feeling of mosquito flying in front of eyes and there are black pots or black dots. It also can result in iritis, glaucoma and others.

2. Peripheral neuropathy: patients have numbness of ends of extremities and are not sensitive to pain and temperature. Several patients have local muscle weakness and muscle atrophy. And there are also some patients have diarrhoea, obstipation, retention of urine,  impotence and others.

3. Foot ulcer: Feet of patients are itchy, festered, black and at the risk of amputation.

4. Diabetic nephropathy: It is a serious complication that may result in death. Serious patients with diabetic nephropathy have to conduct dialysis. Once patients suffer from diabetic nephropathy, they can’t take oral medication because oral medication will cause damages to kidney functions of human body. In case of occurrence of diabetic nephropathy, patients must inject insulin for treatment.

5. Heart disease: the chance that patients with diabetes mellitus is 2-3 times of that of people without diabetes mellitus. Common symptoms include cardiac enlargement, heart failure,cardiac arrhythmia, angina cordis and myocardial infarction.

6. Infection: Patients with diabetes mellitus are in high blood sugar levels so their ability of anti-infection drops because high blood sugar level promotes growth and reproduction of bacteria in human body and inhibit the ability of white cells engulfing bacteria. Common infection includes urinary tract infection, respiratory tract infection and skin infection.

Harms of diabetes mellitus

Although diabetes mellitus is not strange to everyone but our understanding about its harms is still far from enough. The harms of diabetes mellitus is not just about itself but is about its complications!

In 2010, statistic data display that for patients with diabetes mellitus more than 3 years, the probability of occurrence of complications is more than 46%; for patients with diabetes mellitus more than 5 years, the probability of complications is 61%; for patients with diabetes mellitus over 10 years, the probability of occurrence of complications is up to 98%.

The number one cause of uremia, blindness and nontraumatic amputation is diabetes mellitus. Recent researches show that three quarters of coronary heart disease is complicated by high blood sugars and nearly half of patients with cerebrovascular disease is complicated with diabetes mellitus. Researches of many hospitals found that for diabetes mellitus newly diagnosed, more than half is complicated with neurologic diseases while for patients who have been found having diabetes mellitus, the risk of comaplication of gastrointestinal cancer and breast cancer increases obviously. Over time, there will be more and more patients with diabetes mellitus having serious complications in the future. Therefore, prevention and treatment of diabetes mellitus and other chronic diseases have been a important national public health problem.