Complications of a Type 2 Diabetes Diagnosis

It used to be that if you were diagnosed with diabetes decades ago, there wasn’t much hope for a healthy or long life according to the medical community. But that was then. Now, there are so many new advancements to treat - and even reverse - diabetes that you can live normally and have a lengthy lifespan.

But there are complications that come from receiving a type 2 diabetes diagnosis that you do need to be aware of. Some people focus on the immediate complications - and you should.

But you don’t want to forget that diabetes also has long term complications. When you’re first diagnosed, other than experiencing some minor symptoms, you might still feel great.

What you don’t know, though, is that even while you’re feeling great, the organs in your body are under attack. Your heart is struggling with the extra sugar in your bloodstream. Your blood vessels are undergoing changes.

Your nervous system, while seemingly normal, is failing to work the way that it once did. Your eyes are already being affected and so are your kidneys. While it’s true that long term complications take years to develop, by the time they do develop, it’s often too late to do anything to change that.

Long term complications mean that if you go blind from the high blood glucose levels, you can’t fix it. Once you know that you have diabetes, it’s better to go on the offensive. Sure, it might take you a day or even several to come to terms with your diagnosis, but once you do, make the decision that you’re going to do whatever it takes to fight back.

Because your heart and blood vessels are what work to get the blood through your body, these are greatly affected by a diabetes diagnosis. When you’re diagnosed with the disease, the odds are very high that you’ve had it for months or even years.

That means that unbeknownst to you, your heart and blood vessels have been struggling to deal with the risks and complications the disease imposed on them.

The heart complications that you can face include a greater chance of developing cardiovascular disease.

You may have been experiencing chest pain already. The complications to your heart mean that you can have a heart attack or a stroke. A diabetes diagnosis automatically puts you in a higher risk range regardless of your age or weight.

The extra sugar in your bloodstream can cause you to end up with narrowed arteries. Because of the complications you can experience with your heart, this can lead to high blood pressure.

Your heart is having to work harder to get the blood where it needs to go in your body. Due to it having to work harder, the blood pressure becomes raised. When you add in the complications a type 2 diabetes diagnosis causes in the blood vessels, which feed into the heart, this increased the danger factor even more.

The complications from a diabetes diagnosis can continue throughout your body. Nerve damage is common and in a lot of people, has already happened long before you ever reach the doctor.

This form of nerve damage is known as neuropathy. But the good news is that when you get blood glucose levels under control, neuropathy often goes away. It occurs to start with because all of that extra sugar pumping through your bloodstream is damaging the capillaries.

These are blood vessels that connect with your nerves. These small guys are responsible for making sure your nerves are taken care of. When these capillaries are damaged, then the nerves suffer because they’re not getting what they need.

Many diabetics have described the feeling of capillary damage as feeling like fire is coursing through their bloodstream. This burning sensation can occur from your head all the way down to your toes.

A lot of diabetics deal with this issue - not realizing that if they control their blood glucose levels, then this burning sensation goes away and the damage is stopped. The complication of a type 2 diagnosis in this area means that if the higher amounts of sugar are allowed to remain in the bloodstream, the burning sensation escalates until there’s no sensation at all.

You’ll lose the ability to feel anything in the area where the capillary damage was left untreated. This is one of the reasons that some diabetics end up having to have fingers or toes or entire limbs amputated.

That’s usually what people think about when they think about nerve damage - that they’re going to lose a limb. But this loss of nerve sensation goes beyond that. You have nerves in your digestive system that helps you be able to process the foods that you eat.

When your nerves are damaged, it can lead to slow stomach emptying, which can lead to infections in the lining of the stomach. It can also make you feel nauseated or even cause you to vomit after eating.

This kind of nerve damage can lead to a struggle to go to the bathroom with severe bouts of constipation. But on the flip side, it can also cause bouts of diarrhea. The sexual organs can also be affected by this nerve damage complication.

For women, it can mean a loss of sensation in the vagina. For men, it can lead to erectile dysfunction. Some diabetics don’t realize that one of the complications from a type 2 diabetes diagnosis is problems with hearing.

High blood glucose numbers can cause you to experience hearing loss because the auditory nerves can sustain damage. A diabetes complication can also raise your risk of other diseases - especially if you have a family history of that disease.

For example, numerous medical studies have shown that there’s a link between type 2 diabetes and being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. But this risk is only higher in diabetics who don’t keep their blood glucose levels within a healthy range.