Diabetes is a serious and life-changing condition that causes an individual to stop producing insulin. This is called insulin-dependent diabetes because the sufferer will thus become completely dependent on insulin injections in order to be able to absorb and use sugar that comes from their diet.
Insulin is produced by cells called islet cells. Once these are destroyed, you stop producing insulin or produce only very small amounts. Normally produced from a gland called the pancreas, located just behind the stomach, insulin is needed for the body to absorb sugar into the cells and for it to be used to produce energy (ATP).
Unlike type 2 diabetes, type 1 diabetes is not brought on by lifestyle factors or diet changes in most cases. Instead, type 1 diabetes has a strong genetic component and will normally develop in young children aged between either 4 and 7, or 10 and 14. This is what gives it another moniker: juvenile-onset diabetes.
There is no cure for type 1 diabetes and patients must instead focus on managing the symptoms and addressing lifestyle changes. This can help to prevent more serious symptoms such as diabetic shock or coma and with insulin injections and other methods, most sufferers should be able to normal lives.
The key then is to spot the symptoms early before the symptoms get severe. In this post, we’ll look at 16 of the most common symptoms of type 1 diabetes that you can look out for to spot it early.
1. Frequent Urination
One of the most common symptoms of diabetes of either kind is frequent urination. Normally, it is the job of the kidneys to remove sugar from the bloodstream when producing urine. However, in diabetic patients, it is not able to completely remove all of the sugar.
As such, it is likely to continuously need to produce more urine which causes the individual to need to go to the toilet very frequently. They may also find that when they do go to the toilet, they make large amounts of urine and that it doesn’t contain many colors.
