Treating diabetes is a difficult ordeal. Taking pills or giving yourself shots, taking your blood sugar, or any of the other things that you have to do as a diabetic are no fun at all.
But if you don’t take care of it, the end result could be even less fun.
A good diet, exercise, and taking your medication stop any possibility of complications, and could even reverse them.
But if you’re struggling for motivation to stick to treatment, here are just a few common complications that occur when you don’t treat your diabetes.
- Kidney failure. When you don’t treat your diabetes, your blood glucose thickens your nephrons, the structures in your kidneys that filter your blood. If you don’t treat your diabetes, 40% of cases that go untreated progress to kidney failure.
- You lose your vision. High blood glucose levels can harm your blood vessels in your eyes, which can happen up to seven years before diagnosis. 80 percent of diabetics develop retinopathy, which is damage to your retina, and 10,000 diabetics go blind every year.
- You could lose a foot. One of the weirder results of lack of diabetes treatment is the possibility of losing your foot. Diabetes causes damage to the nerves between your brain and lower limbs. In the end, diabetics have about 73,000 amputations every year, and 60% of all amputations are for people with diabetes.
- Your cholesterol and blood pressure go up. Over half of people with either type of diabetes have hypertension, which puts you at higher risk for stroke and heart disease. And diabetes itself lowers your good cholesterol levels.
If that's not motivation, I don't know what is.
