If you have diabetes type 2 and you keep your blood glucose levels around 100, can you still get neuropathyy?
Oct 24, 2009 | Blood Glucose Diabetes
I watch what I eat and take the Metaformin and still I am getting terrible toe pain from nuropathy and half the time I can’t see to read or write a letter. Is my body still being damaged even though I am doing good at trying to control my blood sugar?????????
Diabetes is a progressive disease and doesn’t start at the time of diagnosis. Most diabetics have had it for a few years prior to diagnosis as their blood sugars were gradually creeping up. As we all know it’s a very individualized disease and you may had had some nerve damage occurring prior to and after diagnosis.
There are specialists that can definitively determine if that’s the case with both your feet and eyes.
October 25th, 2009 at 1:37 am
Well…yeah. But keep up the good work. It seems to also depend on how long you are diabetic…20 years being a milestone. Diabetes essentially accelerates the ageing of your tissues. Your blood vessels get more friable…probably you’re getting tiny bleeds in your eye…see an opthalmic surgeon regularly cos a lot of these bleeds can be sealed up by laser and you’ll recover some of your eyesight.
Diabetes tends to cause cholesterol and fats to deposit just below your ankle to block the three moderately sized blood vessels. In engineering maths the flow of a fluid is proportional to the pipes radius to the power of 4 so a tiny blockage can really reduce blood flow. A smoker will tend to block a blood vessel higher up but a diabetic will block at the ankle…this makes femoral popliteal artery bypass more difficult for the diabetic. So get your toes checked and get abpi done regularly too. Walk as much as possible to promote collateral blood vessel formation in the legs but if you encounter pain stop and rest as you don’t want to reduce oxygen tension too much to your toes by over doing it.
Your nerves too can get damaged by diabetes..sometimes in actual fact you can’t feel pain (= don’t notice damage). So maybe let someone get down and check out your toes regularly at home for little traumatic ulcers.You could try gabapentin or Lyrica for the neuropathy.
Piece of advice…don’t reject insulin treatment if offered. Its much better and often all you need is lantus at night.
I think you need to try and reduce saturated fat in your food too as one theory suggests a fat called ceremide ( the stuff in shampoos used to thicken hair) causes a lot of damage as it can’t be stored well and is a by product of saturated fat metabolism. So in general watch sugar and fat content( especially saturated=animal fat).
Its horses for courses though. I have an 83 year old patient who is type I diabetic for 45 years and all he has wrong is the peripheral neuropathy. My Mom is type II since 1988 and has diabetic retinopathy and just lost her left leg after a year fighting gangarene in her middle toe ( Severe peripheral artery disease). I always associate her big "mistake" was in avoiding insulin therapy for too long especially after she had gallstone pancreatitis and probably lost residual insulin production in 2002.
References :
October 25th, 2009 at 1:55 am
Diabetes is a progressive disease and doesn’t start at the time of diagnosis. Most diabetics have had it for a few years prior to diagnosis as their blood sugars were gradually creeping up. As we all know it’s a very individualized disease and you may had had some nerve damage occurring prior to and after diagnosis.
There are specialists that can definitively determine if that’s the case with both your feet and eyes.
References :
Type 2