The Complications from Diabetes

Many complications of diabetes are still unknown. This progressive disease can cause severe difficulties due to its abnormal and elevated blood sugar levels. While this may not seem like a big deal, rest assured that chronically high blood sugar levels can and will wreak havoc on the entire body.

How dangerous can diabetes be?

Well-known complications include nerve damage or neuropathy, especially in your feet and lower legs. You can experience numbness, pain, and tingling in your hands and feet that will drive you crazy. Kidney failure or nephropathy is problematic and vision problems, or retinopathy, results from uncontrolled blood sugars.

A complication of diabetes that seems to go unchecked is skin problems. Diabetes eats away at your immune system, which makes you more susceptible to fungal infections, bacterial infections, and itchy skin, just to name a few. Watch out for blisters, atherosclerosis, eruptive xanthomatotic, and digital sclerosis.

Cardiovascular disease is lurking just around the corner if you have elevated blood sugar levels. The inner lining of your blood vessels cannot function properly if you have high blood sugars delivering fatty deposits that are clogging your veins and arteries.

Peripheral arterial disease happens to one out of every three people with diabetes who are over the age of 50. PAD or peripheral arterial disease materializes when fatty deposits block the flow of blood in your legs. PAD increases your risk of heart attack and stroke. Some symptoms to watch for are excessive leg cramping, numbness, coldness or tingling in your feet or lower legs. Watch wounds on your feet and lower legs. If they are not healing properly, contact your medical provider.

Yeast infections, foot infections, urinary tract infections and surgical site infections can cause permanent and serious complications due to a diabetes-caused weakened immune system. Peripheral neuropathy gives you little warning or sense when you have foot injuries and sores. Amputation is common with peripheral neuropathy.

Diabetes often causes depression. Studies have found that diabetes can make people more susceptible to depression, but depression can lead to type 2 diabetes. Why? There seems to be no answer to this question yet.

A hidden diagnosis of diabetes

When most of the population realizes they have diabetes, they usually believe their diagnosis will be type 2 diabetes. It is common knowledge that type 1 diabetes develops during childhood when the body cannot produce the needed insulin to break down blood sugars. Type 2, or the most common type of diabetes, is diagnosed in adulthood and caused by a learned response to insulin. Lifestyle causes type 2 diabetes.

There is a hybrid form of diabetes that has the similar symptoms as type 2. It develops in adulthood and is caused by low insulin production in the pancreas. Type 1.5 diabetes is not a learned response or a response to lifestyle. Latent autoimmune diabetes or LADA is not actually your fault at all.

Read on to learn more about the complications of diabetes, especially when it's a type that is commonly misdiagnosed.