Diagnose to diabetes

Maybe you suspect that you might have diabetes because you feel cut off permanently, because you have a lot of thirst or a great need for sleep. You may want to have clarity because someone else in your family has diabetes, you may have excess weight and feel physically not so fit. All these factors increase your risk of becoming diabetic.

Describe your doctor exactly how it feels. He will ask more questions and probably recommend a blood test. This test shows how high the blood sugar level. Whether you have diabetes or not, shows the test value:

If you have not eaten, then your blood sugar level less than 5.6 millimoles per liter (100 milligrams per deciliter) are located. After a meal, your value may increase up to 7.8 millimoles per liter (140 milligrams per deciliter). These are the values ​​for healthy individuals.
It is questionable if the blood sugar after a meal from 7.8 to 11 millimoles per liter (140 and 199 milligrams per deciliter) is located. Doctors call this a case of impaired glucose tolerance. For these people, the risk of developing diabetes, twenty times higher than for those with normal values.
As diabetes are those whose blood sugar fasting of 7 millimoles per liter (126 milligrams per deciliter) or after eating 11.1 millimoles per liter (200 milligrams per deciliter) is reached or exceeded. Even using the so-called long-term blood glucose levels, your doctor can determine Hba1c diabetes. Diabetic you are, if this value is 48 millimoles per liter (6.5 percent) met or exceeded.

If the doctor when you set diabetes, he will probably advise you to further investigations.

symptoms of diabetes

Type 2 diabetes sneaks up quietly, until it is detected, it can take several years. Doctors often discover the disease at a random other investigation. Or before surgery, because the stress is driving before surgery, the blood sugar and insulin requirements in the air. The same applies to a heart attack or stroke. Even in such situations, physicians often provide surprising to diabetes.

Although diabetes does at the beginning with no clear warning signs are, there are some symptoms that they may betray. These include the following characters:

They feel cut off and have a great need for sleep.
They have constantly thirsty and have to go to the bathroom often.
They take off to fast without.
Your skin on your feet is dry.
The skin itches your body strong.
Genital inflammation of the skin, perhaps located there also a fungus.

Damaged nerves acknowledge their service

Visual disturbances may also be a consequence of diabetes. You will see at close range are not as good, reading is difficult for you. Also, diabetes can interfere with sex: In women, the vagina is not wet anymore so quickly, and later the ability to be, to feel pleasure. In men, the element stiffness is impaired.

Too much sugar in the blood attacks the nerves, so everyone has a so-called tenth Diabetic neuropathy, nerve damage. The tactile nerves are attacked, you realize the fact that tickle the feet, the skin may also feel numb there.

Nerve damage can in rare cases, stomach and intestines move in turmoil: These patients then suffer more frequently than healthy abdominal pain, bloating, constipation or diarrhea.

Time bomb sugar

Anyone who is diabetic, a long time feels quite well. Only now and then people with diabetes are flabby. But, they think it may eventually have many reasons. That they are diabetic, perhaps, they are not likely. For the first type 2 diabetes makes no complaints. With bad values ​​come later. Because too much sugar in the blood damages the arteries in the long run. Diseases and causes of eye, heart and kidneys.


Unfortunately the body does not report when too much sugar in the blood circulates. The alarm system does not respond to pain. Just remember at the beginning of the disease affected not know what is happening in their bodies. Discovered only after a check-up or before surgery the doctors accidentally elevated blood sugar levels.

Of diabetes doctors talk but only when the blood sugar levels are too high permanently. In people with type 2 diabetes is the case. Because their body cells do not respond properly to insulin. This hormone is responsible as a key to open the door to the cells to absorb sugar as an energy donor. In type 2 diabetes, this key hooks over the years, sometime it does not fit anymore.

In response, the pancreas produces at the beginning of the disease, too much insulin to inject yet more sugar to the cells. But over time the body's cells become increasingly less sensitive to the hormone. At some point, experts suspect, from the overworked insulin-producing cells burn and produce less or no insulin. The sugar stays in the blood and damages the veins in the long run, particularly those in the eyes, kidneys, nerves and heart. Therefore, the infarction and stroke in people with diabetes is twice to four times higher than in healthy subjects.
The genes they beat a trick!

For more than seven million people in Germany were already diagnosed with diabetes. Ninety percent of them suffer from Type 2, known as adult onset diabetes. Experts estimate that 18 to 28 percent of people aged 60 and over have diabetes - including more men than women. From the 70th Life revolves around the relationship, however.

Whether you get diabetes type 2, determined a combination of heredity and lifestyle. The genes alone, at least not all seal their fate. If you are not overweight and move around a lot, maybe you can manage to hit one over your predisposition to diabetes.

Studies show that not 50 percent of people with diabetes have an increased risk for diabetes because they are moving a lot and stayed on their weight. Particularly at risk, however, women who develop diabetes during their pregnancy or have had a child are that weighed more than four pounds. Twelve percent of these women are in the course of six years after the birth of diabetes.

It's best to let your sugar levels checked regularly by your doctor. For it is better to detect diabetes early, and not just when he has already done damage. Are you older than 35 years, paid for the compulsory health insurance funds under the so-called check-up 35th For this check, you can do every two years, is one way, and an examination of the cardiovascular system.

Living with the syringe

It usually begins as a teenager: The worse affected are in school and in sports. Take it off without it they want. Increasingly, they are thirsty and have to go to the toilet as often. These symptoms are typical for type 1 diabetes

In Germany there are about 250,000 people with type 1 diabetes. What goes wrong in their body, is easy to describe your pancreas produces no insulin. This hormone is a vital strike in the energy metabolism: Insulin helps many body cells to absorb sugar - the one fuel that the cells need to survive.

Lack of insulin, glucose enters the no longer in the cells of muscles, but instead he stays in the blood and accumulates there. Thus, the body loses a lot of water. At the same time mobilizing the body's fat reserves, and transform them into energy. So acid occur in the blood. Then the person gets no insulin, he is unconscious - the body is fighting for survival.
Blame for the drama is usually the immune system

There are several reasons why the pancreas is not working properly. Usually it is the body's immune system. It focuses its weapons against its own cells. In the case of type 1 diabetes against those cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. The immune system classifies these so-called beta cells as intruders and mistakenly attacks them one until they are destroyed.

Why the immune system starts this campaign of destruction is yet to be clarified in detail. Scientists suspect that direct the body's defense against viruses is misleading, for example, can trigger such viruses, measles, rubella or mumps. However, there are other causes of diabetes. In a specific variant of type 1 diabetes, type 1B diabetes, the pancreas cells that make their insulin production for no apparent reason. However, playing in both versions of the diabetes genes play a certain role.
Critical: the right amount of insulin

People with type 1 diabetes rely on insulin for life. How much must you inject it depends on your lifestyle, your age and your metabolism. If you constantly inject just a bit too much, it affects your body from fatal: The blood of over-sugared and over again and grabs arteries, kidneys, nerves and eyes. If worst comes to worst, the kidney fails blind, eyes, limbs die and have to be amputated, the heart suffers a heart attack. If you forgot to inject insulin, the risk of severe hyperglycemia. Then you can even slip into a coma.

The other extreme is the hypoglycaemia. It occurs when you give the body more insulin than it needs, for example before exercise. Then your brain goes out of fuel. You will notice this because you are distracted and nervous, perhaps even aggressive. Maybe your skin looks pale and other people perceive you as confused. You may talk nonsense and can not find your way around. If you drink at the first signs of low blood sugar or something sweet to eat immediately, you become unconscious.

Cure type 1 diabetes can not: the daily injections will remain lifelong habit for those affected. But well-treated they can lead an almost normal life.

Trafficking in the blood

Candy, coke, chop: sugar found in many foods. Barely slipped through the stomach into the intestine, slips of the sugar into the bloodstream through the intestinal wall. The blood brings the sweet substance to the hungry cells. Brain, muscles, heart - all organs need glucose as fuel. Without him, would starve the cells, they would die.


Many body cells can not simply absorb the sugar from the blood. You need help with this: The hormone insulin the sugar smuggled through the wall of the cells in its interior. Without insulin, the smuggling of sugar would remain on the sidelines, so the blood. Then the sugar concentration in the blood is too high, experts speak in such a case of a high blood sugar or hyperglycemia value.
This hormone comes from the pancreatic gland

Insulin is produced by the pancreas gland or, more precisely in the beta cells of the so-called islets of Langerhans, small clusters of cells in the tissue of the gland. There, the hormone is also stored. Around ten milligrams of insulin keeps the pancreas gland always in stock, enough for about five days.

Once we've eaten, empties a portion of memory. The high amounts of sugar in the blood signal the pancreas to release insulin. Because the beta cells begin immediately with the production of new insulin, the depot quickly fills up again.
The cells are checked for illegal

So the smugglers hormone, insulin cells help the hungry while eating, it needs to be found on the cell surface grip. Thus serve as docking sites called receptors. The loops are designed so that only insulin can fix them. Almost all body cells have on their surface such insulin receptors. Once the hormone has been linked into the receptors, the starving body cells absorb sugar from the blood. Thereby slow the sugar content in the blood decreases.

Supplied the cells begin immediately to dismantle the sugar to produce energy for their work. What they do not consume immediately, lands in the energy reserves of the liver and muscles. Such deposits are not from glucose, the cells can burn, but from a special form of memory, called glycogen. With the transformation of glucose in these insulin helps glucose storage as well. The hormone stimulates the liver and muscles to build storage depots of glucose.

Sugar is fuel for the body

Man is not self-goers. Every day, every second of our cells to swallow rough amounts of energy so we can breathe, walk and think, live and laugh. When the fuel cells is mainly sugar, or more precisely glucose. Without this we could not survive glucose. But our brain burns around 140 grams of glucose a day. This is as much as ten tablespoons of sugar.

In order for our bodies, we must not pure sugar spoon in its purest form. Our bodies can produce the fuel itself - and for everything: bread, pasta, potatoes or chops. This will take some time, however, because the metabolism requires many intermediate steps until he has produced from food to fuel glucose.
Two teaspoons of sugar in the blood

The easiest way, the metabolism, if we eat pure glucose, so glucose. Therefore, Sweet is also considered food for the nerves: the sugar passes quickly through the intestines into the bloodstream and from there to the brain. Almost the same processed sugar our bodies. Flour, potatoes and noodles made from starch, so a chain of glucose building blocks. Can cleave the body in the intestine, and already he has the coveted fuel. Even fats and proteins our body can convert into energy, but this takes quite a long and successful only in a roundabout way.

From the intestine or the liver of the sugar enters the blood: There are swimming everywhere and in healthy 60-140 milligrams of glucose, depending on whether one is sober, or has eaten a meal. This refers to a deciliter, which corresponds to a champagne glass full of blood. A newer unit determines the value in millimoles per liter: 3.4 to 7.8 in healthy subjects should be. Extrapolated to the entire body revolve around one to two teaspoons of sugar in the blood. This red-transport stream brings the fuel to each cell.
Store in good times, burn in times of need

Normally, we eat more sugar than necessary. A part of our body lies a surplus in the muscles and liver to make fats from it. Fat stores energy and may well be stored in cells. Most of the surplus lands, but as a store of sugar, so-called glycogen in the cells: Up to 450 grams of it - as heavy as four and a half bars of chocolate - fit into our body's own cell depot.

Hard times come then brings to our body's first energy saving from these sugars. Even at night when the last meal back is long, the organism reaches back to glycogen. But the sugar can burn the memory cells are not, therefore, the liver converts the glycogen back to glucose. Our muscles are not as generous: they build the glycogen off only when they themselves require energy.

While keeping body fat depots can be very long - that we have painfully learned in diet-resistant fat pads, enough storage capacity for glycogen only for about 24 hours. The distress lasts longer, for example, because the man makes a starvation diet is, the metabolism in order to implement an emergency program: it provides glucose them yourself. This happens mainly in the liver. She then builds the body's own protein to glucose.

The baby in the belly with eating

The belly is getting rounder and rounder, and occasionally someone comes from inside it. Usually calms the mother. But sometimes it also arouses fears: Is everything all right with me and the baby? Pregnant listen into a special way in her body. Some of them are missing, but - for example, if their sugar metabolism is messed up.


Such develop gestational diabetes nearly three percent of expectant mothers in Germany. The difference between this so-called gestational diabetes and other forms of diabetes is simply the fact that the glucose metabolism for the first time during pregnancy is no longer working well.

Blame it on hormones. During pregnancy, regulate some neurotransmitters such as estrogen, placental lactogen and progesterone metabolism of the mother. Eventually, mother and child must share the food, both should be able to supply their cells with enough sugar to fuel, from which the cells gain energy.
Hormones make cells insensitive

Especially in the second half of pregnancy, estrogen and Co. can blunt the body's cells, however: You will no longer respond as well to the metabolic hormone insulin. This messenger smuggled sugar from the blood into the cells. The body cells respond only sluggishly to the hormone-smuggling, they can not get enough of the sweet substance. So the sugar stays outside, in the blood.

Normally, the pancreas gland rinsed once more insulin into the bloodstream when the sugar level rises there. For some pregnant women the gland but not enough to deliver insulin, the glucose levels in the blood remains high, therefore. This happens often between the fifth and seventh month of pregnancy. After birth, the blood sugar levels usually commute by itself again. However, if you suffer from diabetes before the pregnancy, it will remain even after the birth.
Diabetes can leave babies in the womb of large

Too much sugar in the blood of mother and child at risk: the mother is at increased risk of developing high blood pressure or a bladder infection. It can develop a life-threatening illness: the so-called pre-eclampsia. This is the precursor to eclampsia, a type of seizure, which can collapse the whole organism.

Also for the unborn in the womb means a lot of sugar much risk: your pancreas must produce more insulin to cope with the high blood sugar. The excess glucose ends up in fatty tissue. Often these babies are very large and very heavy. A baby weighs at birth more than four pounds, is probably complicated childbirth - these babies are often born by Caesarean section. Some of these very heavy babies have jaundice, maybe they are hypoglycaemic. Ignore the pregnant women or treating their diabetes, they are only now and then, they give their children a bad start in life: Then the offspring can be too thick and may later be diabetic.

Some mothers suffer later in life are still suffering the consequences of gestational diabetes: almost half of all women over the course of ten years from diabetes after birth - even if they could handle it. Mostly it is then a type 2 diabetes
Do not give your cravings for sweets after

During pregnancy to make muffins and jam as a bow and satisfy your Süßbedürfnis with fresh fruit instead of bread, you should prefer to buy whole grain bread and enjoy your rice with a decent portion of vegetables. Light sports such as walking, cycling or swimming is good for you and your baby well - and lowers blood sugar levels. But if you have continued despite proper diet and exercise too much sugar in your blood, you probably need insulin.