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Diabetes is a silent disease which can hide considerable damage to your body for a long time before showing any signs. So when discovered, it is not uncommon to find or over time develop damage to certain organs like:

• Kidneys
• Eyes: changes to vision even blindness
• Blood vessels: narrowing and occlusion
• Nerves: abnormal or loss of sensation
• Guts: slows bowel movement, increasing the risk of ileus

Because it is a systemic and a chronic disease, diabetes can be an underlying cause of many complications. Some of most common are:

• Cerebral stroke
• Hearth attack
• Abnormal blood lipids metabolism
• High blood pressure
• Ileus (less or total inability for the normal food stuffs ability to move forward in the gut and intestines)
• Diabetic foot (foot gangrene) – foot infections, ulcers and dying tissue on the foot
• Kidney disease and failure
• Skin conditions
• Nerve damage
• Obesity
• Ketoacidosis – high level of ketones in the blood due to deamination of amino acids and breakdown of fatty acids.

Here it easy to understand why early detection is associated with better disease control and less chance of developing serious life threatening complications. Doing so may in turn prolongs life and increases the quality of life with the disease (6).

High blood sugar and ketones:

When you miss your insulin dose or have a lower insulin production, less insulin can signal for the sugar from the food you have eaten to be absorbed by your muscle, fat or liver tissue. Since the sugar isn’t taken up by these tissues this causes your blood sugar rise. Since your muscles and brain still need energy and no sugar is taken up the body starts to believe it is starving. A second energy system where breakdown of fatty acids, and to some extent proteins in your muscles, are started and a new energy mediator, ketones, are created. Therefore, a good indicator for diabetes symptoms is a higher level of ketones in your blood. The ketones will give your body and brain the energy it needs but not to the same extent as glucose which the symptom of irritation is a good indicator of. Due to the nature of the ketones they will also make your blood acidic. Blood acidity is not good for your health and it causes hard and laboured breathing.

As the ketones gives you’re the energy you need the high blood glucose remains and is a serious concern. The sugar has detrimental effects to the blood vessels since it makes them hard and inflexible. The smaller vessels will even be damaged too much and destroyed which in turn causes less blood to reach the outer skin, your organs and the neurons in your brain. The effect from a high blood sugar is thereby less sensitivity to your skin, giving rise to more frequent damage and infections, less blood flow in your organs, which causes tissue damage, and more damage to your brain, which causes development of dementia and Alzheimer earlier. All of this is common in type 1 diabetes and if these signs apply to you it is important that you test yourself for diabetes and contact your healthcare provider (2).

Symptoms of low blood sugar:

As no blood sugar can be absorbed when no insulin is released or the effect of insulin on uptake is impaired, the same symptoms as those of low blood sugar appear. Blood glucose level below 70 mg/dl (US) or 3,9 mmol/l (EU) endangers your life and health. At and beneath this level you need to receive sugar immediately.  The cause of low blood sugar can be when you miss a meal or receive medicine without eating (1). The side-effects and what you cause you to feel:

• Sweating
• Irritability
• Paleness
• Shaking
• Weakness
• Palpitations
• Tremor
• Confusion
• If sever enough it will cause unconsciousness and seizures