Dr David Lloyd discusses using diabetes drug for anti-aging
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Nausea, heartburn, or bloating can have many causes, but for people with diabetes, these common digestion issues shouldn’t be ignored. That’s because high blood sugar can lead to a dangerous condition known as gastroparesis which causes food to be stuck in the stomach further increasing a person’s risk of life-threatening complications.
Type 2 diabetes can affect a person’s digestions system and can cause severe symptoms and affect quality of life.
Diabetes is the most common known cause of gastroparesis, a digestive disorder that may lead to poor nutrition and problems managing blood glucose.
Gastroparesis is a condition that affects the normal spontaneous movement of the muscles in a person’s stomach.
The condition affects the stomach’s motility and becomes much slower or doesn’t work at all, preventing the stomach from emptying properly.
If food stays too long in the stomach, it can cause problems like bacterial overgrowth from the fermentation of food.
Also, the food can harden into solid masses called bezoars that may cause nausea, vomiting, and obstruction in the stomach.
Bezoars can be dangerous if they block the passage of food into the small intestine.
Symptoms of gastroparesis includes:
- Vomiting
- Nausea
- Abdominal bloating
- Abdominal pain
- A feeling of fullness after eating just a few bites
- Vomiting undigested food eaten a few hours earlier
- Acid reflux
- Changes in blood sugar levels
- Lack of appetite
- Weight loss and malnutrition.
Why the feelings of fullness after eating?
When your stomach is working right, it contracts to crush food, which it then sends to the intestines.
However, with gastroparesis, the stomach can’t contract like it should, so food builds up there instead.
Apart from feeling full after a normal meal, a person may often feel bloated.
It’s not always clear what leads to gastroparesis, but in some cases it can be caused by damage to a nerve that controls the stomach muscles known as the vagus nerve.
The vagus nerve helps manage the complex processes in your digestive tract, including signalling the muscles in your stomach to contract and push food into the small intestine.
“A damaged vagus nerve can’t send signals normally to your stomach muscles,” said the Mayo Clinic.
The health site added: “This may cause food to remain in your stomach longer, rather than move into your small intestine to be digested.
“The vagus nerve and its branches can be damaged by diseases, such as diabetes, or by surgery to the stomach or small intestine.”
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