Diabetes is a lifestyle medical condition that affects many people in Idaho Falls because of living a sedentary lifestyle. Different types of diabetes include type 1 diabetes, an auto-immune condition where the body doesn’t produce enough insulin. The body’s resistance causes type 2 diabetes to the effects of insulin and commonly occurs in adulthood.
Other types of diabetes include gestational diabetes, which is a type of diabetes that affects pregnant women. If you have a family history of diabetes where your first-degree relatives have the disease, you should regularly screen for diabetes. Treatment for type 2 diabetes by Ms. Kara Olsen in Idaho Falls depends on the severity of your condition and the treatment can include a combination of many modalities.
What Are the Risk Factors of Type 2 Diabetes?
When your body is producing enough insulin to breakdown glucose, but the body cells are resistant to the effects of the insulin, you are at a high chance of type 2 diabetes. Some risk factors that put you at risk of developing type 2 diabetes include being overweight and obese. Your risk of developing type 2 diabetes worsens if you have a large waist to hip ratio, if you have excess fat distribution around your abdomen and if you are living a sedentary lifestyle with little physical activity and eating highly processed foods.
Type 2 diabetes is also common in some races, like in blacks and Hispanics, more than Caucasians. A person of any age can get type 2 diabetes, but this condition is more common in people more than 45 years old.
Having dark armpits and neck is a sign of insulin resistance and indicates that you are at risk of type 2 diabetes. Some medical conditions can put you at risk of type 2 diabetes, including polycystic ovarian syndrome, making your body resistant to insulin. If you get gestational diabetes when you are pregnant, you are at a higher risk of getting type 2 diabetes in the future.
How Does Type 2 Diabetes Present?
It takes a long duration for the symptoms of type 2 diabetes to become evident. Most people with type 2 diabetes are asymptomatic in the early stages of the disease. Some of the symptoms of type 2 diabetes include excessive thirst and hunger. If you have type 2 diabetes, you will start losing weight unintentionally and experience fatigue even when you have been inactive.
Type 2 diabetes also causes you to have a frequency of urination. If you do not seek treatment for the disease early enough, you may develop more severe symptoms like blurring vision and chronic non-healing wounds. Diabetes also affects cells of the immune system and, therefore, lowers the immunity of the body and makes you prone to infections.
Some of the complications of type 2 diabetes include heart diseases, high blood pressure, and cardiac arrest. Diabetes also causes peripheral neuropathy, which is a condition that damages the nerves in the peripheries. Peripheral neuropathy presents with numbness, tingling, and pain in the extremities.
When the nerves in the legs get damage, you are more prone to accidents and infections because you have lost your sensation. Because of the delay in wound healing, you may develop tissue death, which necessitates the limb’s amputation. Sleep apnea and skin infections are other symptoms of type 2 diabetes.
Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease that mostly affects people who lead a sedentary lifestyle, are overweight or obese, and people with a family history of the disease. The symptoms of type 2 diabetes include excess thirst, hunger and urination, and unintentional weight loss. You should seek treatment when you develop these symptoms to prevent complications of the disease.