What are the symptoms?
According to the NHS, the main symptoms of diabetes are: “feeling very
thirsty; urinating more frequently than usual, particularly at night;
feeling very tired; weight loss and loss of muscle bulk; itching around the
penis or vagina, or frequent episodes of thrush; cuts or wounds that heal
slowly; blurred vision (caused by the lens of the eye becoming dry)â€. In
type 1 diabetes, these symptoms come on quickly; in type 2 diabetes, they
develop slowly, and many sufferers do not notice the onset of the condition,
sometimes for years, because the early symptoms are non-specific. The
disease worsens the longer it is left untreated, so the NHS says “you should
therefore visit your GP as soon as possible if you have symptoms.â€
What are the risk factors?
Obesity and high blood sugar are the warning flags.
What does it do to life expectancy and quality of life?
It is possible to live a normal life with diabetes, if sufferers eat healthily
and take exercise and manage medication (if needed) well. However, on
average, diabetes sufferers have shorter life expectancies: roughly 10 years
shorter than average in the case of type 2 diabetes, according
to Diabetes UK, and 20 years in the case of type 1. However, those
numbers are changing as diabetes care improves.
Left untreated, diabetes can cause blindness, heart disease, stroke, nerve
damage (sometimes leading to ulcers and even amputation of limbs), and
kidney failure.
Do people know about it?
According to the psychologist of risk Daniel Kahneman, the public hugely
underestimates the danger of diabetes, because it is less dramatic than
other risks. For instance, the US public on average believes that accidents
are 300 times more likely to kill you than diabetes; in fact, diabetes kills
four times as many people as accidents.