Why Diabetes Makes You Pee?

Excessive peeing or passing of urine is often the first symptom of Diabetes which leads an individual to seek medical advice. It is usually coupled with excessive thirst to compensate for the water lost through urination or peeing. But why diabetes makes you pee? In this blog post, I’ll try to explain the phenomenon in the simplest way.

Diabetes or Diabetes Mellitus is a condition where your blood sugar levels remains high chronically leading to many symptoms and complications as well. The most common symptoms include increased thirst, increased hunger and of course increased urination or peeing. Often people suffering from Diabetes losses there sleep, as they have to get up in night in order to use the washroom. Unless treatment is taken, the symptom may hamper the day to day activity.

Why Diabetes makes you pee?

Polyuria, the technical term for excessive peeing in Diabetes, can occur both in frequency or the number of times you have to use the washroom, as well as in volume or the amount of urine passed each time. Kidneys are the site where the blood is filtered and urine is formed. Normally when kidneys filter the blood to form urine, a good amount of sugar is also passed in to the urine. But in normal healthy individuals, almost all of the sugar is reabsorbed and sent back to the blood stream. However, if there is already an excess of sugar in the blood stream as seen in Diabetics, the kidney doesn’t effectively reabsorb the sugar that it filtered from blood into the urine. At this stage a phenomenon called Osmosis comes in to play. Osmosis is a process by which fluid or solvent (in this case - water), moves from compartment of lower concentration of solute (in this case blood in the compartment, solute being the sugar) to the one with higher concentration of solute (undiluted urine with high sugar), in an attempt to make the concentration of both sides almost equal. Thus, we can say that high concentration on unabsorbed sugar in the kidneys results in drawing of water and thus forming of more urine than normal. This makes diabetics pee more often.

Hope you have understood why diabetes makes you pee. Are you suffering from frequent urination? Consult a doctor and get a Random Blood Sugar (RBS) test done to see if it is Diabetes that is the devil behind the frequent use of washroom!