• Guest - w'd love to know what you think about the forum! Take the 2025 Survey »

Long term consequences prevention

M

Miklos92

Newbie
Messages
3
Hi everyone,

I was diagnosed type 1 diabetes 2 years ago, at age 26.

Since I was diagnosed early (I was lucky) I had quite a few months of honeymoon period, where I was taking 20 units of tresiba in the morning and my blood sugar was very stable. Over the last few months I started increasing tresiba based on higher overall sugar, and at the moment I am using 36 units in the morning. I am not sure if my honeymoon is completely over or it will get worse, but at the moment it is still very manageable.

I am using libre (NHS prescription) and Miao Miao, so my alarm goes on whenever I need to correct something. It is a lot of sacrifices in food, but since I am being very disciplined and training a lot, my hba1c has been always between 5 and 6.

My question is: If someone can keep their hba1c in normal range (range of healthy, non diabetic person) and can avoid sugar lows and highs ( I never have sugar above 12mmol since at 8.4mmol my alarm goes on and I start taking extra insulin - apidra), are there any long term consequences?

I have a feeling that my life is much healthier now when I was diagnosed with T1 - I train more, I lost fat and gained muscle, I eat better and I sleep better. I am just focused more on healthy lifestyle. If I ( or anyone else) can keep this for longer period, with blood sugar level being as close to healthy person as possible, are there still any long term implications of T1?

Obviously, I am aware of usual long term problems, but if I understood it well, these are caused by excess glucose in blood, which I am trying to prevent as much as I can.

Thank you for reading and answering! :)
 
Miklos92 said:
My question is: If someone can keep their hba1c in normal range (range of healthy, non diabetic person) and can avoid sugar lows and highs ( I never have sugar above 12mmol since at 8.4mmol my alarm goes on and I start taking extra insulin - apidra), are there any long term consequences?
Click to expand...
I tried to find the answer to this exact same question a couple of years ago.

My conclusion was that it's impossible to know, because there simply isn't enough data.
Before CGM, it was impossible to know how many highs and lows someone had. Also, on fingerpricks only, or even on urine tests, it was almost impossible to keep hba1c in the non diabetic range without having lots of hypo's (and even with CGM it's impossible for most of us). Anyone with hba1c's this low would have been advised to lower their insulin doses for safety, and still now many HCP's assume you're going hypo all the time, even when you have the CGM data to back you up.

Diabetes complications often only appear many decades after diagnosis, so to be completely sure you'd need 70 years of data from a large group of T1's having kept their bg's as closely controlled as you do right now for all those 70 years. Impossible.
Even if you bring it down to 40 years you're looking at people who have worked with urine tests and the occasional blood test from the hospital before switching to fingerpricks.

And then there's the phenomenon of some people getting complications early, with reasonable blood sugars, and others get away with only some mild complications after 60 years of highs and lows. So getting complications isn't something predictable, like 'if you go this high for that many hours a day you'll develop retinopathy after 15 years'.

Personally, I'm counting on healthy numbers protecting me from complications, but no-one can guarantee you anything. I also have no reason to assume I'll be able to keep my BG's at healthy numbers all my life. I do now, but who knows what may change.
 
Last edited:
I believe in reducing risk and your current lifestyle is reducing risk.
That does not mean you will definitely have no complications but your chances are much better that if you ran your blood sugars higher, didn't exercise and didn't sleep.

If you spend your life worrying that because you have Type 1 diabetes (something that is not your fault), you are about to get heart disease or kidney disease or go blind or ,,, you are not living.
Enjoy life. manage your diabetes but remember that you are more than Type 1 so don't stress if you see the occasional higher number.
 
This doesn't come with promises or guarantees, just the common sense that the better control you keep over your blood sugar, the less severe your complications will be, relative to what they would be if you didn't. But nobody can tell you it'll all be just dandy if you keep your numbers low. We're all different, and that includes some of us probably tolerating excess blood sugar better than others. Bear in mind that some classic complications of diabetes, such as neuropathy, can have other causes. Even being non-diabetic doesn't guarantee you won't get them.

Take a look at this thread: https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/th...ariable-than-youd-expect.178437/#post-2341486

It's perfectly acceptable for someone without diabetes to spike as high as 11 occasionally. I did a morning fasting blood on my (not diagnosed as diabetic, and no reason to suspect that they are) girlfriend the other day, and got a 5.7. So you're probably not doing yourself damage if you occasionally get close to, or even into low double figures, as long as you're bringing them down, ideally to 4's and 5's most of the time between.

Be mindful of it, but try not to let it rule your life.
 
Good control here, 2 eye complications already, 1 only less than a month into my diagnosis and the 2nd only 2 years in so while it can reduce risk it most certainly does not eliminate it I'm afraid

Also you say you had a few months of honeymoon period where you only required 20U of Tresiba, I personally don't see that as much of a honeymoon, honeymoon generally comes with a reduced dose or even no insulin at all, I honeymooned for about 2 years and only required 1 unit of Tresiba and had a lot of carbs to play with for 1 unit of fast acting
xx
 
Back
Top