Diagnosing Diabetes
Hunger, thirst, vomiting, headaches, nausea, confusion, dizziness, and urination are all symptoms of diabetes. However, most people ignore them as mere common complains of daily living, so it is very important to have a diagnosis once these symptoms begin to appear.
The diagnosing diabetes is conducted by physicians mostly rely on the results of glucose tests. One way is by letting a patient have and overnight fasting. After an overnight fast, the glucose concentration in the plasma of the blood should be generally less than 100mg/dL. If the glucose concentration level in the blood is higher than this and is accompanied by classic diabetes symptoms as mentioned earlier, then there is sufficient evidence to diagnose that a patient has diabetes. If the concentration of glucose in the blood is greater than 100mg/dL but the symptoms are absent, two samples of a patient’s plasma with concentrations greater than 140mg/dL is sufficient enough to establish a diagnosis of diabetes on non-pregnant adults. A slightly lower concentration of glucose in the plasma of a pregnant woman may serve as an indicator of diabetes.
In some instances, if glucose concentration in the plasma after fasting did not reach the range for diabetic patients, diagnosing diabetes can be done by measuring glucose concentrations after the patient ingested glucose. Two hours after the ingestion, if the glucose concentration level in the blood is roughly equal or higher than 200mg/dL, then there is a high possibility that the patient has diabetes. This will be confirmed by a second trial of the same test. If the similarity of the tests shows similarity, then there is enough evidence to diagnose diabetes. However, this form of glucose tolerance test is more useful in determining the prevalence of diabetes in a population rather than that of a single patient, since the results of this kind of test vary in the same person from day to day and year to year.
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