There are a lot of people diagnosed with diabetes in this country. In fact, experts predict that half of the people in the United States currently have diabetes or suffer from prediabetes. That makes knowing what the warning signs are of this potentially deadly illness extremely important. Perhaps the most important of the warning signs to watch out for are the ones that you may not think of as symptoms of diabetes. Sometimes, these symptoms can mask themselves as being from another source entirely. Knowing what the so-called silent symptoms are will allow you to take steps to get tested whenever you encounter them.
The problem is, everyone thinks that they are unlikely to get diabetes. So when these signs happen, they simply attribute them to something else entirely. This can cause major problems because if you don’t get diagnosed early, and the disease is going to keep wreaking havoc on your system and there have been many people that learned about their diabetes late in life and had to undergo things like amputation or severe illness. If you have any of these warning signs, there is no harm in talking your doctor and getting checked for diabetes.
1. Numbness
The first warning sign we will talk about is numbness. This is usually in the extremities, especially in the hands, fingers, legs and feet. This is a major early warning sign of diabetes. This is caused by the blood not being able to reach those extremities due to the increased level of blood sugar and restrictions of the blood vessel.
Eventually, since the nerves cannot get the blood that they need, nerve fiber damage happens. If this happens to you, then you should get checked out right away as this is probably the most common early warning sign.
