Diabetic neuropathies—the nerve damage tied to diabetes—sometimes yield few to no symptoms while other times they may yield pain, tingling, or numbness. Today it is estimated that between sixty to seventy percent of diabetics experience one or another form of diabetic neuropathy, highest among those who have had the condition for at least a quarter century, but also common among those with difficulty controlling glucose, those with high blood fat levels, and those who are overweight.
Diabetic nerve pain is not limited to tingling, and can be experienced in toes, feet, legs, hands, arms, and fingers. It can also involve indigestion, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, uncomfortable constipation, dizziness, and general weakness.
But diabetic nerve pain of the genuinely direct kind hits in several different ways. Peripheral neuropathy, considered the most common diabetic nerve pain, involves pain or loss of feeling in your toes, feet, legs, hands, and arms. In peripheral neuropathy—which is also known as distal symmetric or sensorimotor neuropathy—your feet or legs could be affected first, including numbness or insensitivity to pain or temperature as well as tingling, burning, or prickling feelings, sharp cramps, and loss of balance. And, these discomforts are usually worse at night according to numerous analysts. You may also experience muscular weakening and reflex loss, particularly around your ankles, and that may affect how you walk or provoke such abnormalities as hammertoe or midfoot collapse, and blistering is possible around numb foot areas because pressure or other injury is not detected. Delayed treatment can indeed spread any infection to the bone and force foot amputation.
Proximal neuropathy causes thigh, hip, or buttock pain and often leads to leg weakness. And, focal neuropathy provokes sudden weakness in single or groups of nerves and can cause either muscular weakness or pain, or both. Also known as femoral neuropathy or diabetic amyotrophy, it usually begins on one side of your body and is more common among type 2 diabetes sufferers and in older adults who have any type diabetes. This condition can make it difficult for you to stand up without help, and treatment is usually needed, with recovery time varying according to the kind of nerve damage involved.
Focal neuropathy affects specific nerves in the head, torso, or leg, and can cause aching behind one eye, one-sided facial paralysis (Bell’s palsy), pain in the front of your thigh, or sever pain in your lower back or your pelvis. In fact, the chest or abdominal pains are sometimes mistaken for heart disease or appendicitis. But you can also experience chest, stomach, or side pain, or pain in your outer shin or inner foot. This type of diabetic nerve pain is unpredictable and usually affects older adults. The good news is that it often improves itself over weeks or months and is unlikely to cause long-term damage, according to several medical analyses.
Diabetics who think they have nerve-related pain should consult their doctors at soon as possible to determine the actual cause and appropriate treatments. Doctors will test for nerve damage in several ways, including but not limited to using different items to touch or prick possibly affected areas and treat immediate symptoms such as previously-unfelt cuts or sores thanks to numbnesses.
Doctors and other health clinicians now recommend diabetics to undergo comprehensive annual examinations aimed directly at checking for diabetic neuropathies, and often as not medications are prescibed to control and reduce this problem which, like diabetes itself, can be controlled but not cured. Other tests can include electromyography to determine your type and extent of diabetic nerve damage; checking for heart rate variables; and, ultrasound, usually to guard against diabetic nerve damage causing other discomforts among internal organs such as your bladder.
Some medications deployed against diabetic nerve pain include tricyclic antidepressants (you do not need to be a diagnosed clinical or manic depressive for these medications to be prescribed for diabetic nerve pain), anticonvulsants, or opiods. In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has now approved duloxetine and pregabalin as specific medications to treat severe peripheral neuropathy.