Is Peripheral Neuropathy Inevitable When You Have Diabetes?

As the more than 38 million Americans who have been diagnosed with diabetes can confirm, being diagnosed with this chronic condition is just the first step in what can be a challenging health journey.

Complications related to diabetes literally stretch from head to toe, from vision loss to diabetic foot wounds. Included in this mix is one of the most common side effects of diabetes: peripheral neuropathy (PN), or nerve damage, which affects half of people with diabetes.

Given that November is National Diabetes Month in the United States, double board-certified foot health specialist Dr. Thomas Rambacher and the team at Foot Ankle Leg Wound Care Orange County are taking a closer look at diabetes-related neuropathy in this month’s blog post. And spoiler alert: this nerve damage isn’t inevitable.

Diabetes and the health of your nerves

To understand how diabetes can affect your peripheral nerves, which are those nerves outside your central nervous system, it’s helpful to briefly review what you’re up against when you have the condition.

Under normal circumstances, any sugar or glucose that ends up in your bloodstream should get carted off by the hormone insulin, which is produced by your pancreas. This hormone grabs the glucose and delivers it to your cells, which use the sugar for energy.

When you have Type 2 diabetes, there are two issues at play:

Your body and cells becomes resistant to the action of insulin
Your pancreas is unable to make enough insulin to break through the resistance

When this happens, you’re then left with dangerous and unhealthy levels of sugar in your blood, which can lead to:

Damage to the blood vessels that deliver key resources to your peripheral nerves
Oxidative stress
System-wide inflammation
Chemical changes in your nerves that interfere with signaling
Damage in nerve fibers

Each of these side effects of higher-than-normal blood sugar levels sets the stage for peripheral neuropathy, which typically develops in your lower limbs, and less often in your upper limbs.

Peripheral neuropathy is progressive

Type 2 diabetes doesn’t happen overnight. Insulin resistance develops over time and usually on the heels of poor eating habits and lack of exercise (your body isn’t using the glucose).

Well, peripheral neuropathy is the same. It develops over time and due to consistently high levels of glucose in your blood.

So, it makes sense to do what you can to avoid these complications from the moment you receive your diabetes diagnosis. The reality is that, while half of people with diabetes develop some degree of PN, the other half doesn’t as they take steps to manage their high levels of blood sugar right from the start through:

Glucose monitoring
Insulin treatments
Improved diet to lower A1C levels (the measurement for glucose)
More exercise to better use glucose
Weight loss

Even if you have developed some degree of nerve damage, these steps may work toward reversing the neuropathy, but only during the early stages. At the very least, you can halt any further progression of the nerve damage.

As experts in diabetic foot care and the aftermath of advanced peripheral neuropathy — namely diabetic foot ulcers — we understand better than most that managing diabetes well is the key to good health moving forward.

So, whether you want to avoid peripheral neuropathy or you suspect that nerve damage might already be taking hold, we invite you to come see us for a proactive visit. To get that ball rolling, please call our office in Mission Viejo, California, at 949-832-6018 or request an appointment online today.