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Diabetes timescale?

drillingcat

drillingcat

Member
Messages
13
Location
UK
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Diet only
I'm just wondering, and feel free to tell me I'm being really daft asking such a question, but as newly diagnosed T2 diabetic of 6 weeks, who had presented no symptoms, is there any way at all of working out when I may have actually developed diabetes?

Yes, yes, feel free to mock! :wink:

It's just that two years ago I had an operation and some people seem to think that I would have had some sort of blood works done then, so perhaps it would have been spotted at the time if I had it?

Any ideas?

And thanks in advance, I love lurking on this forum it's so informative! :P
 
drillingcat said:
as newly diagnosed T2 diabetic of 6 weeks, who had presented no symptoms, is there any way at all of working out when I may have actually developed diabetes?
Click to expand...
Well, you can make an educated guess but there isn't any way to tell for certain. If you have no symptoms at all then you are unlikely to have been severely hyperglycaemic for very long (that would cause symptoms quite quickly). However, if the hyperglycaemia was mild it might have gone unnoticed for a while. You could easily have been "pre-diabetic" for many years.

drillingcat said:
It's just that two years ago I had an operation and some people seem to think that I would have had some sort of blood works done then, so perhaps it would have been spotted at the time if I had it?
Click to expand...
Not necessarily. The main thing that they would be looking for in a pre-operative blood screen are things that have an effect on surgery (clotting factors and various cell counts could be indicative of infections). It is quite likely that they did a "full blood screen" at the same time, and that would include blood glucose. This could have picked up diabetes, but equally well it could have missed it. That is because this was, no doubt, done at a random time of day rather than as a fasting test in the morning. Had the glucose level been extremely high someone would, no doubt, have followed it up. However, you can be fairly sure that you didn't have a severe hyperglycaemia two years ago or you would be symptomatic by now. A slight hyperglycaemia isn't very meaningful in a random test, because non-diabetics blood sugars vary throughout the day.
 
thank you diabetic geek, your response was most informative.

i guess there's really no way of knowing unless you present some sort of symptoms. cheers!
 
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