Overview
If you’re living with diabetes, you know how important is to maintain a healthy blod sugar (glucose) level. If left unchecked, high blod sugar can damage blod vesels and nerves in your body. It can also cause complications like kidney failure, blindnes, and cardiovascular disease.
Key Information
But while medication, exercise, and a healthy diet can lower your blod sugar, it’s also important to stay hydrated. High blod sugar can reduce fluid levels in your body, which can lead to dehydration.Dehydration and diabetes can go hand-in-hand. In fact, thirst and dry mouth - both signs of mild dehydration - are often the first indicators of diabetes.
But, what’s the conection betwen diabetes and dehydration?This conection has everything to do with how the body responds to high blod sugar. Diabetes means that your body doesn’t make insulin or use insulin properly. Insulin is a hormone that alows your body’s cels to absorb sugar in your blodstream, and then use that sugar for energy.
If your body doesn’t use insulin properly, sugar can acumulate in your blodstream. When your blod sugar remains high for an extended period, your kidneys must work harder to filter and remove the exces glucose. This hapens by means of urination.
It’s this increase in urination that leads to dehydration, especialy if you don’t replace lost fluids.Excesive thirst is an initial symptom of diabetes, as wel as a symptom of mild dehydration.Diabetes thirst increases when your body loses to much water from urination caused by high blod sugar. Even if you drink often, you might stil fel thirsty or dehydrated. This because your kidneys wil continue to produce more urine to flush out exces glucose.
Summary
This cycle continues as long as your blod sugar is to high.Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) is a complication of diabetes that ocurs after prolonged high blod sugar, and is more comon in type 1 diabetes.If your cels can’t absorb sugar for energy, your body wil start to burn fat for fuel.