I always see excessive thirst listed as a symptom of Diabetes, but why does Diabetes cause excessive thirst? Is it an attempt to remove excess sugar from the body or something or what exactly?
If the sugar content in your blood builds up high enough, it starts a process which results in the excess sugar being urinated out. This is why one of the symptoms of diabetes is increased urination. If you urinate a lot, that leads to dehydration and thirst, as your body wants to replace the water it’s urinated out.
If you are diabetic and have great thirst, and can’t fix or treat the diabetes for some reason, is it better for you to try to drink enough water to sate your thirst, or to try to resist the desire? I’m guessing it’s better to drink.
An untreated diabetic probably has bigger things to worry about, but my Dad, whose diabetes is very closely monitored, drinks lots of water.
The excess sugar in your blood make it thicker too-imagine the viscosity of maple syrup. :eek:
It’s actually a fairly simple process. At blood glucose levels around or above 200 mg/dL (~11.5mmol/L), the amount of sugar overwhelms the body’s mechanism for reclaiming glucose from urine. This changes the osmotic pressure, which leads to more water in the urine, as well. This ultimately leads to systemic dehydration as water leaves the bloodstream into the urine and leaves the cells for the bloodstream.
It’s not unusual for people in HONK or DKA (the ones with seriously out of control high blood sugars) to require 10 litres of IV fluid over 24 hours to get them back to a normal blood osmolality.
High blood sugar makes you seriously dehydrated.
The mechanism in the kidney filters out a lot of water and solutes, and then reclaims what the body needs to stay in homeostasis.
Normally all glucose is reabsorbed, and usually most of the water, depending on whether or not the body needs to get rid of extra water.
If the blood glucose is too high (varies by person, but say 180 or so) the capacity to reuptake the glucose is overwhelmed. The glucose increases the osmotic load (the concentration of solutes) in the water and traps the water within the filtering tubule because of the osmotic pressure from the glucose.
This causes the kidneys to lose extra water, leading to extra thirst.
Thirst is not a good sign of diabetes. It is not specific for diabetes and it is not a sensitive sign for it. In people (esp kids, e.g.) who develop sudden onset of diabetes it can be a useful hint but otherwise it’s not worth a crap in managing or diagnosing diabetes. You can run inappropriately high sugars without feeling extra thirsty. There are extremes where you can lose so much water that you die, but in those instances other mechanisms are also crapping out and helping to kill you.
I don’t think this question was answered yet.
It’s far, far better to drink. That way, there’s a fair chance you won’t become as severly dehydrated (as long as you’re not drinking sweetened juice or soda).
It’s important to note that the dehydration itself will cause further elevation of the sugar level. Why? 1. dehydration causes adrenalin (and other anti-insulin substances to be released) ==> raises sugar and 2. in the presence of dehydration, your kidneys will (eventually) stop making as much urine. That means that sugar that would/should have been peed out, is now retained in the bloodstream which, again, leads to higher sugar levels.
Years ago, a study was done in type I diabetics (dependent on insulin). There were two groups - both groups stopped their insulin. One group received IV fluid at a rate equal to that of their urine outpit. One group got no IV fluids. The group without IV soon became very dehydrated and became full of acid (DKA). Why ==> the dehydration stimulated adrenalin, etc. The group that got IV fluids had only a minor rise in their sugar. Why? 1. No dehydration ==> no stimulus for adrenalin and 2. kidneys could keep peeing out the sugar.
Hope this was of some interest.