How does diabetes impact kidney health?

Your kidneys are essentially massive biological filtration systems made up of millions of microscopic blood vessels called glomeruli. They act like a sieve, filtering waste products out of your blood while keeping vital proteins inside. When your blood sugar is chronically high, it forces the kidneys to work in overdrive to filter out the excess glucose. Over years and decades, this unrelenting heavy workload physically damages the delicate filtration system. The holes in the "sieve" become too large, allowing essential proteins—specifically albumin—to leak out of your blood and into your urine. This condition is called diabetic nephropathy. Like eye damage, early kidney disease has absolutely no physical symptoms, meaning you won't feel sick until the kidneys are severely failing. To catch it early, you must have your doctor perform two specific tests every single year: a simple urine test to check for the presence of albumin (microalbuminuria), and a blood test called an eGFR (estimated glomerular filtration rate) which measures how efficiently your kidneys are clearing waste. Tight blood pressure control is also crucial to protecting them.