Hey, All — if you've got questions active life with diabetes, then you've come to the decent place! That would be our weekly diabetes advice column, Necessitate D'Mine, hosted by stager type 1 and diabetes author Wil Dubois. This week, Wil is answering a question about whether other health conditions can stimulate higher glucose levels and lead to diabetes, and hold D-complications happen more quickly. To get wind more, register on…

Atma, eccentric 2 from British Columbia University, Canada, writes: I had standard fast blood glucose until 2012. And past In 2017, I had a sudden rash all finished my body and was diagnosed with Hansen's disease. I conscionable read that infections addition blood glucose levels, which coincides with my diabetes diagnosis in 2017. I consume two questions: Could Hansen's lawsuit upper glucose levels? Derriere four long time of undiagnosed high blood sugar levels cause neuropathy?

Wil@Ask D'Mine answers: Hansen's. Diabetes. Neuropathy. Yipes, it sounds care the three Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Ohio. Hold back. There's supposed to be four of those SOBs. But, placid, this is a lot to deal with, and I'm precise sorry to see about your troubles. I don't know how much help I can be now, but at to the lowest degree I can try to provide some clarity on what has transpired beneath your skin, and we can use your question as a jumping-off point to look back some neuropathy fundamentals for our other readers, likewise.

So let's starting line in that location. Looking at your second doubt first, the serve is: Maybe, merely I doubt it. Neuropathy from elevated stemma dinero is usually viewed as a longitudinal-terminus complication, attractive a tenner or more to develop to the point of awareness. That being the case, wherefore do you sometimes read about someone being co-diagnosed with diabetes and neuropathy? Well, the sad fact is that many people have type 2 diabetes for 10, 15, or even 20 years before information technology's discovered; providing a long period of boiling diabetes to cook their nerve cells.

Cook? OK. That was more of a literary device than a scientific truth. Over time, elevated sugar in the blood kills OR damages almost every kind of mobile phone in your bod. In the pillow slip of nerves cells, the sugar-fueled equipment casualty is called neuropathy, and it comes in two flavors.

The arguably slightly better variety of this plague is unmatched in which the nerves are tainted so that they give up to use properly, deadening sensation. The risk here is that if you can't palpate pain, you own zero awareness of injuries. This, coupled with minimized healing and circulation seen in people who have squeaky blood lettuce, greatly increases the endangerment of minor injuries prima to very serious consequences. How serious? Last year, down Here south of your border, 108,000 PWDs confiscate piece of a leg to neuropathy complications—usually injuries that advance to gangrene—in what are called lower berth-extremity amputations. You folks up northbound run close to 8,000 a year, merely it's a smaller universe. I'm not trying to scare anyone, but this needs to be taken earnestly.

Why? Because near all of these amputations could've been prevented past the simplest of measures: Kissing your feet good Nox. Every night.

Past that, I mean lovingly check your tootsies each and every night. View them. Touch them. Make anathemise sure null is unseasonable with them. Atomic number 102 cuts. No bruises. No malodorous colors. Nary tacks or nails projected out of them. It sounds impractical, merely on that point are hundreds—in all probability thousands—of documented cases of D-peeps with neuropathy showing up at a doc's place completely unaware that a sharp physical object is enclosed in their neuropathy-dull feet.

The other sort of neuropathy fits in better with our Horsemen of the Revelation theme. In this replacement, instead of killing murder the ability of the nerves to properly sense, the sugar short circuits the nerves so that they are constantly sending come out of the closet pain signals. The level of pain can intensify way beyond Dante's Inferno.

Sadly, in both cases, our treatment options are limited, and non all that effective. The better bet is to shoot for the maximum contingent blood glucose control, because no matter how big things seem, they have the potential to get regular worse. Worse than you tin can imagine.

But don't despair. If you stimulate neuropathy, ace good thing in your favor is that a lot of people have neuropathy on with you. What could possibly be expert astir that? Hey, it's a good market for the drug companies, soh there's a great deal of research active into medications that might help in the future.

Now, in gain to the fact that four years is a bit short for neuropathy, I doubtfulness your sugar was elevated that entire clock time. We only know that in 2012 you were all right, and at some point in the next four old age your saccharide went to hell. My gut instinct is that the sugar rose slowly over that clock, thusly I doubt that you've had raging high sugars for the full 4 years.

But if your nerves weren't damaged by your saccharify, what did damage them? Frankly, I cerebrate information technology was the Hansen's. Now, in keeping with our quasi-Biblical theme today, what with the Horsemen and all, for you readers who cogitate you've never heard of Hansen's disease, I guarantee that you have. You just wear't recognize its new gens. In the past days it was called Leprosy, and for those of you that think Atma is authorship me from a Leprosy colony, you're exterior-of-date.

Hansen's disease is caused by a ho-hum-growing bacterium called Mycobacterium leprae, and IT's treatable with a cocktail of 2-3 antibiotics, typically dapsone, rifampicin, and clofazimine. Thither we go with Horsemen again. These drugs need to be taken for up to two years, but the end result is typically a sonorous cure.

So… who the heck was Hansen, and how did Leprosy get named aft him? He wasn't the 1st lazar; He was a Norwegian physician named Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen. In 1873, he identified Leprosy bacillus as the smoking triggerman in Leprosy. Sort of. He did a lot of the leg work, simply concluded up enlisting the support of another scientist, Albert Neisser, who then tried to withdraw full credit for the discovery. But before you feel too blue for Hansen, you need to know that he lost his hospital C. W. Post after disagreeable to infect an unaware female patient with Leprosy to show that information technology was infectious, non, as it was believed at the time, a hereditary disease. And in a case of Divine Payback, or leastwise the kind of historical irony that appeals to my warped brain, Hansen was plagued with pox while his rival Neisser is remembered as the discoverer of the pathogen tail the other major sexually transmitted disease: gonorrhea.

But I digress. Back to Leprosy.

Mycobacterium leprae, as you have experienced, mainly affects the skin. It also attacks the eyes and nose. But under the skin, it goes afterward the peripheral nerves, which are the nerves nearly affected past neuropathy. Sadly, unlike Leprosy, there's no cure for neuropathy. Simply given the sentence line, it seems more likely that your nerve problems are from the Leprosy hemipteron, instead than from the sugars. Speechmaking of sugars though, what about your question about the connection between Hansen's and diabetes. Does Hansen's cause high saccharide?

Mayhap so.

One subject from the 1970s showed an step-up in roue sugar among Leprosy patients over controls, but it likewise discovered that the sugar levels resolved in almost of the patients when the Hansen's disease was vulcanized. This suggests that the infection can raise blood scratch, as umteen infections do, but information technology doesn't appear to trigger full-on diabetes, like in your case. Other research has recommended a connective Eastern Samoa well, and spell it hasn't been fleshed out very well yet, it did tip one team to recommend showing of all Hansen's patients for diabetes.

Still, tending that you're instantly Hansen's aweigh, but motionless have the diabetes, I'd guess that while the Leprosy might have triggered the diabetes, you were already predisposed to diabetes.

In other words, the diabetes was lurking in your genes, waiting for something else to come alive information technology up. And Dr. Hansen's discovery was the alarm.

This is not a medical advice editorial. We are PWDs freely and openly sharing the wisdom of our collected experiences — our been-there-done-that knowledge from the trenches. Bottom Line: You still demand the professional advice and care of a licenced medical professional.