What happens to my body after prolonged exposure to a high blood sugar level?

What happens to my body after prolonged exposure to a high blood sugar level?

Anne Peters, MD, FACP, CDE (Professor and Director of Clinical Diabetes Programs, USC Keck School of Medicine) gives expert video advice on: What causes type 2 diabetes?; Does type 1 diabetes only occur in childhood?; Is one type of diabetes worse than the other? and more...

High blood sugar levels are very, very toxic to the body, but before I use words like 'high,' I want to define 'high'. So a normal blood sugar, I say, is a hundred. It's an easy number to remember. There's a range around a hundred but most of us, most of the time, have blood sugar levels around a hundred, and that's what you expect. That's what you want. When you have diabetes, your blood sugar levels can be two hundred, three hundred, four hundred; very high. When your blood sugar levels get to be above three hundred you feel very thirsty, dehydrated, you start urinating a lot, your eyes may get blurry, and you don't feel right. High blood sugar levels, say they go up high to three or four hundred, will make you feel sick. The problem, though, is that most of the time people who are getting diabetes have blood sugar levels that are around two hundred and they don't feel sick. In fact, most people have diabetes for five to seven years before they're diagnosed. So, many people are wandering around who have diabetes and don't even know it because they have no symptoms. That blood sugar of two hundred, though, is causing damage. It's damaging the back of the eyes, the nerves, the kidneys, and the heart. All of that is susceptible to this damage from the sugar. We don't exactly know why and how sugar damages these vital organs but we know it does, and we know that lowering blood sugar levels to normal takes away the risk for those complications.