Do People With Diabetes Drink A Lot of Water

Diabetes patients usually have the tendency to drink a lot of water due to high blood glucose level and frequent urination especially during the nights.

Due to excessive drinking, diabetes patients will have frequent urination and increased urine volume which will in turn make them drink even more water. This often bothers patients a lot. Even though, patients should not limit water intake or it can cause hemoconcentration and increased plasma osmotic pressure. As a result, excessive sugar, nitrogen-containing wastes can not be discharged efficiently and this will worsen their illness conditions. What is more, the root cause of frequent urination is high blood sugar instead of drinking a lot of water. On the contrary, inadequate water intake is not good for diabetes.

However, if you are now drinking a lot of water, that does not definitely mean you have diabetes. For example, there is one endocrine disease called diabetes insipidus which is characterized by drinking a lot of water and urinate a lot. Patients can have daily water intake of 8000-10000ml or even more, but their blood sugar is normal and they do not have diabetes. Diabetes insipidus is caused by lesions in the pituitary gland or hypothalamus.

The same thing is that if you do not have the symptom of polydipsia (it means that you tend to drink a lot of water but still have constant thirty feeling), that does not mean you do not have diabetes because not every diabetes patient will have typical “three polys and one little” symptoms. There are some patients that do not have obvious symptoms and many of them find that they have the disease due to other chronic pathological conditions or during routine physical examinations.

Diagnostic basis for diabetes should include the following points.

·have typical symptoms of diabetes and at the same time random blood sugar is higher than 200mg/dl (11.1mmol/l)

·FBG (fasting blood glucose) is higher than 126mg/dl (7.0mmol/l)

·blood sugar level higher than 200mg/dl (11.1mmol/l) 2 hours after the glucose tolerance tes.

Other symptoms that diabetes patients might have include eating a lot of foods, loss of body weight, skin itching, blurred vision, numbness, etc.