Diabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disease that can cause disability and death. How the disease progress is a matter of great concern to sugar lovers.
However, sugar lovers often make a mistake: only the blood sugar level is used as the criterion for evaluating the disease condition.
In fact, the main harm of diabetes is not hyperglycemia itself, but various acute and chronic complications caused by hyperglycemia.
Therefore, in addition to blood sugar, the assessment of sugar friends’ illness should also consider the risk factors leading to disease development and various acute and chronic complications.
Diabetes doctors have summarized the manifestations of 5 kinds of deterioration of the disease. Let’s take a look at them as soon as possible and compare them with each other.
1. Blood sugar remains high or fluctuates greatly.
Long-term hyperglycemia is closely related to vascular complications of diabetes, especially microvascular complications, such as diabetic nephropathy, diabetic retinopathy and neuropathy.
The worse the blood sugar control, the earlier and more serious these complications occur.
The harm of blood sugar fluctuation is even greater than that of stable hyperglycemia. In other words, the greater the blood sugar fluctuation, the more serious the harm to the body.
Therefore, sugar lovers should not only reduce blood sugar, but also stabilize sugar.
2. There are many risk factors for cardiovascular diseases.
Cardiovascular risk factors of diabetes include hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hyperuricemia, abdominal obesity, etc.
Compared with patients with simple hyperglycemia, the more these cardiovascular risk factors, the higher the risk of cardiovascular complications in the future.
3. Recurrent acute diabetic complications
Acute complications of diabetes include severe hypoglycemia, diabetic ketoacidosis, hyperglycemia and hypertonic syndrome, severe infection, etc.
The recurrence of these acute complications often endangers the life safety of patients, and at the same time, it also indicates that the patient’s condition is very serious.
It should be noted that severe hypoglycemia is more harmful than hyperglycemia.
Many diabetics are afraid of high blood sugar and disagree with hypoglycemia. In fact, the harm of hypoglycemia is even worse than that of hyperglycemia. A cardiovascular event induced by severe hypoglycemia may cause myocardial infarction and cerebral infarction, which may threaten the life safety of sugar lovers and is enough to make the patient’s lifelong efforts to reduce blood sugar go to waste.
Infection is also an important factor that seriously affects the quality of life and life span of sugar lovers.
Because sugar friends’ immunity is reduced, infection is easy to occur, and once infection occurs, it will increase the difficulty of blood sugar control. Infection and hyperglycemia collaborate, further worsening the condition of diabetes.
4. Chronic complications have occurred
The main harm of diabetes comes from its various chronic complications, including diabetic nephropathy, diabetic eye diseases, diabetic neuropathy, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, diabetic foot, etc., which are the main causes of disability and death of diabetic patients.
According to statistics, about three quarters of diabetics eventually die of cardiovascular complications.
Therefore, whether chronic complications of diabetes occur is one of the most important indicators to judge the severity of diabetes.
5. [Fragile Diabetes] Patients
The common characteristic of patients with type 1 diabetes and advanced type 2 diabetes is that the function of islet B cells in patients has completely failed and they can hardly secrete insulin.
These patients have high blood sugar and must be treated with insulin replacement for life. Once the blood sugar is not well controlled, acute complications such as ketoacidosis will easily occur and endanger their lives.
Not only that, because the islet function of such patients is very poor, blood sugar often rises and falls, fluctuating greatly, and it is very difficult to control, [fragile diabetes] refers to this kind of situation.
There are also ways to relieve severe diabetes.
Perhaps many sugar friends are already worried when they see here:
According to this view, am I not hopeless?
Don’t worry, the severity of diabetes can be transformed into each other under certain conditions.
If patients with mild diseases cannot adhere to regular treatment for a long time, and various metabolic indexes such as blood sugar, blood lipid and blood pressure do not meet the standards for a long time, they may change from quantitative change to qualitative change, and the disease condition may change from mild to severe. However, even for patients with serious illness, through regular and systematic treatment, it is entirely possible to reduce the illness to a certain extent, at least delaying the pace of progress of the illness.
Therefore, not only the sugar friends with serious illness mentioned above need to be on guard, but also the sugar friends with mild illness cannot relax treatment.
So, which sugar friends are less ill?
It is generally believed that diabetic patients who meet the following three conditions at the same time belong to mild diabetes:
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Blood sugar remained stable for a long time without hypoglycemia.
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No acute or chronic complications;
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If you have normal weight, can live freely, and can be competent for normal work, you can think that your illness is relatively mild.
To sum up, blood sugar is only one of the important indicators to evaluate diabetes, not the only one.
Among the many indicators to judge the severity of diabetes, the most important ones are two: the blood sugar level and the presence or absence of complications.