Diabetes explained

See your doctor
The following signs and symptoms are good indicators that you have type 2 diabetes. If you experience many of these symptoms, check with your doctor:

Fatigue: Type 2 diabetes makes you tired because your body's cells aren't getting the glucose fuel that they need. Even though there is plenty of insulin, your body is resistant to its actions.

Frequent urination and thirst: You find yourself urinating more frequently than usual, which dehydrates your body and leaves you thirsty.

Blurred vision: The lenses of your eyes swell and shrink as your blood glucose levels rise and fall. Your vision blurs because your eye can't adjust quickly enough to these changes in the lens.

Slow healing of skin, gum and urinary infections: Your white blood cells, which help with healing and defend your body against infections, don't function correctly in the high-glucose environment present in your body when it has diabetes. Unfortunately, the bugs that cause infections thrive in the same high-glucose environment. So diabetes leaves your body especially susceptible to infections.

Genital itching: Yeast infections, often called thrush, also love a high-glucose environment. So diabetes is often accompanied by the itching, creamy white vaginal discharge and discomfort of yeast infections.

Numbness in the feet or legs: You experience numbness because of a common long-term complication of diabetes, called neuropathy. If you notice numbness and neuropathy along with the other symptoms of diabetes, you probably have had the disease for quite a while, because neuropathy takes more than five years to develop in a diabetic environment.

Heart disease: Heart disease occurs much more often in people with type 2 diabetes than in people who don't have diabetes. But the heart disease may appear when you are merely glucose-intolerant, before you actually have diagnosable diabetes.

Obesity: If you're obese, you are considerably more likely to acquire diabetes than you would be if you maintained your ideal weight. But not all obese people develop diabetes, so obesity isn't a definite sign that you have diabetes.

Extracted with permission from Diabetes for Dummies by Dr Sarah Jarvis and Alan L Rubin (John Wiley & Sons Inc., £14.99)