Symptoms of high blood sugar depend on whether you’re in the early or later stages of the condition:
Early symptoms. You’ll feel thirstier, pee more often, get headaches, and have blurred vision.
Long-term symptoms. If you’ve had hyperglycemia for a while, you may feel extremely tired (fatigued), lose weight, get skin or vaginal yeast infections, and have trouble healing from cuts or sores.
People with prediabetes, or a blood sugar level that’s higher than normal, usually don’t have any signs or symptoms of the illness.
Related:Where to Get Healthy Carbs
Causes of High Blood Sugar
When you have diabetes, certain things can cause your blood sugar to rise, including:
Being sick
Stress
Overeating foods with sugar or carbs
Being less active than normal
Missing doses of insulin
Your diabetes medicine isn’t working well
Taking steroids or other medicines
Recovering from surgery
Diabetes Diagnosis
Doctors use these tests to find out if you have diabetes and prediabetes:
Fasting plasma glucose test. The doctor tests your blood sugar levels after fasting for 8 hours. A level higher than 126 mg/dL indicates you have diabetes, while 100 to 125 mg/dL means you may have prediabetes.
Oral glucose tolerance test. After fasting for 8 hours, you get a special sugary drink. Two hours later, if your sugar level is higher than 200, this could mean diabetes, and 140 to 199 mg/dL suggests prediabetes.Random check. The doctor tests your blood sugar and it’s higher than 200, plus you’re peeing more, always thirsty, and you’ve gained or lost a lot of weight. They’ll then do a fasting sugar level test or an oral glucose tolerance test to confirm the diagnosis.
A1c test. This test averages your blood sugar level over a few months. A level below 5.7% is normal, while between 5.7% and 6.4% means you have prediabetes.
Any sugar levels higher than normal are unhealthy. Levels that are higher than normal, but not reaching the point of diabetes, are called prediabetes.
According to the American Diabetes Association, 96 million people in the U.S. have this condition, which can lead to diabetes if you don’t make healthy lifestyle changes that your doctor suggests. It also raises the risk for heart disease, although not as much as diabetes does. It’s possible to keep prediabetes from becoming diabetes with diet and exercise.
High Blood Sugar
What are the dangers of high blood sugar? Glucose is precious fuel for all the cells in your body when it’s present at normal levels. But it can behave like a slow-acting poison.
High sugar levels slowly make cells in your pancreas less able to make insulin. The organ overcorrects, and insulin levels stay too high. Over time, the pancreas is forever damaged.
Related:How Too Much Sugar Harms Your Body
High levels of blood sugar can cause changes that lead to a hardening of the blood vessels, what doctors call atherosclerosis.Too much sugar can harm almost any part of your body. Damaged blood vessels cause problems such as:
Kidney disease or kidney failure, requiring dialysis
Strokes
Heart attacks
Vision loss or blindness
A weakened immune system, with a greater chance of infections
Erectile dysfunction
Nerve damage, also called neuropathy, that causes tingling, pain, or less sensation in your feet, legs, and hands
Poor blood flow to the legs and feet
Slow wound healing and the potential for amputation, in rare cases
Keep your blood sugar levels close to normal to avoid many of these health problems. The American Diabetes Association’s goals for blood sugar control in people with diabetes are 70 to 130 mg/dL before meals, and less than 180 mg/dL after meals.
