Diabetes causes numerous long-term illnesses and complications that develop in the body. However, doctors of today are not 100% sure why these complications develop. There are theories, but most of them are based on testing and findings within a small number of animals and people.
The latest research points the cause of long-term complications due to years of the body reaching high blood glucose levels. Typically, 10 years is the average number when people start showing signs of illnesses due to high blood sugar levels.
Your Kidneys
Your kidneys play a vital role in your body's organ system. Their job is to wash out toxins, chemicals, and other compounds from your body. You could easily compare the kidneys to a “filter” in which this filter constantly has blood running through it while it traps waste products and then diverts those waste products through the urine. Once this blood is cleaned and filtered, it is then dumped back into your system for normal circulation. The kidneys also have another job which is to regulate the salt/water content of the body.
People with diabetes, especially type 2 diabetes, run the risk of damaging these important organ systems. Once kidney disease hits and the kidneys start to fail, a person will need to have their blood artificially filtered by a machine. This is called dialysis. Dialysis will not only filter the body's blood, but it will also control the salt and water levels.
Due to diabetes, 50% of those people with kidney failure must be on long term dialysis treatments. The good news is that recent surveys are showing that this number is slowly declining due to more people becoming educated about the risk of running high glucose levels.
Because diabetes is categorized into two parts, type 1 and type 2, there are different numbers of people from each group that reach the point of kidney failure from high glucose levels. Only 5% of those people that have type 2 diabetes hit kidney failure. That is a significantly low number compared to the 30% of people who reach kidney failure that have type 2 diabetes.
Sometimes the best offense against diabetes is a good defense. Click here to discover the truth about diabetes.
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