How to Monitor Yourself for Diabetes

Diabetes is a disease of the pancreas, an organ behind the stomach that produces the hormone insulin. When a person has diabetes, the pancreas either cannot produce enough insulin, uses the insulin incorrectly, or both. This causes your body to be unable to use glucose for fuel. Diabetes, if left uncontrolled, can kill you. Here are some of the symptoms of diabetes. If you have several of these, please see your doctor for further testing as soon as you possibly can.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Excessive thirst (often accompanied with unrelieved dry mouth).
2. Excessive urination.
3. Excessive hunger.
4. Increased fatigue (constantly weak or tired feeling).
5. Unexplained weight loss (or sometimes an unexplained gain) of ten or twenty or more pounds.
6. Numbness or tingling of the hands or feet.
7. Blurred vision or sudden and unusual vision changes that have no recently defined cause such as a bump on the head.
8. Sores that have no explained origin that heal slowly. (Especially common on the feet.)

Tips & Warnings

• Just because you have no family history of diabetes does not mean that you won't develop diabetes. Diabetes is also affected by weight, lifestyle, and age. So if you have any symptoms, please see your doctor and let him/her perform further testing.