Per example, a toe or even a leg
In: Biology
One of the ways is kinda similar to how AIDS kills, in that it makes it easier for other things to kill you. Diabetics can suffer from neuropathy, where feeling is lost in extremities. Generally, the further away from the heart the easier this is, but doesn’t always happen that way.
So if you don’t really have a lot of feeling in your toes, if you sustain any damage like cuts or punctures, they can get infected pretty easily since you aren’t doing anything about it. In addition, diabetes slows your recovery rate so things take foreeeehhhhver to heal. Before you know it, things can get so bad the only option is amputation. And indeed complications from that can require further amputations!
Simply put, if you have nerve damage (which diabetes can cause) you might not feel some things that happen to you. You can injure yourself seriously and not realize it because you’re not feeling the pain. The extremities are where this is most likely to happen.
Ergo, you don’t seek help, or don’t treat the injury seriously. So it gets worse. And it gets way worse. And while it should be rare, if a part of your body *dies* for whatever reason – typically loss of proper blood flow – it will rot on your body and cause you all kinds of health problems. At that point the solution is to remove the dead material, like by amputation.
Similar things can happen with other nerve damage diseases like leprosy.
In addition to the nerve damage mentioned, having high blood sugar for a long time starts to make it more difficult to heal wounds. So there’s damage to a foot, for example, it doesn’t heal well, it gets infected and then some or all of the foot has to be removed if the infection can’t be ended with antibiotics.
Chronic high blood sugar leads to damage to blood vessels that ultimately restricts blood flow, especially in the extremities. Less blood flow means slower wound healing and higher risk of infection. Eventually the limb might get infected to the point where it needs to be amputated.
Diabetes affects the body in many ways. Some of them related to this question include:
1) Blood vessels – narrowed arteries can bring less oxygen which can lead to tissue death and narrowed arteries that supply nerves lead to nerve damage so you may not notice small injury that then can lead to larger injury if not attended to.
2) Nerves – nerve damage not only means our sensation may be altered, but damaged nerves to muscles means that muscles become weak over time and it can ultimately change the shape of your foot or other body part. Altered shape of the foot can cause abnormal pressure points and this pressure again can slow down blood flow to the area and can also cause small skin cuts due to rubbing against poorly fitting shoes, etc. Nerve damage can also affect our body’s ability to sweat and secrete normal oils which can be protective for maintaining a good skin barrier to outside world/bacteria.
3) Affects immune function – high blood sugars impair ability of white blood cells to travel to the area of damage and impairs their ability to kill bacteria. Bacteria also thrive in conditions where there is a bunch of extra sugar around to use as energy.
In general, when someone with diabetes has part of their body (usually feet/legs as these are some of the farthest structures from the heart) amputated it is either due something called dry gangrene where there is just not enough blood supply and the tissue is dead and sometimes just falls off on its own (auto-amputate) or wet gangrene where there isn’t enough blood supply causing dead tissue that then gets superimposed infection due to a combination of all the factors above.
It’s kinda a sequence of different effects. The abnormally high blood sugar that typifies untreated diabetes has a tendency to damage blood vessels and disrupt blood flow across the body. This itself can cause a wide range of problems, including nerve damage, slowed healing, and outright death of cells. The high blood sugar also disrupts the immune system.
When a body part is lost to diabetes, it’s usually because of a diabetes associated infection spreading to the point where it either directly kills off that body part or otherwise becomes so widespread that that body part needs to be amputated in order to prevent further damage to the body.
This infection usually starts from a diabetic ulcer, which can itself be caused by a physical injury or by that area of skin dying due to a lack of blood flow. Either way, the wound is often not noticed due to diabetic nerve damage making that region numb. Therefore, the wound is often left completely untreated making severe infection much more likely. Compounding this is the reduced healing and disrupted immune system effects of high blood sugar, which results a wound that would take a long time to heal and would be more prone to infection even if it was noticed and treated.
These problems usually happen on the feet, in part since the anatomy of the legs and feet tends to cause blood flow problems there just in general.
I’ll post this every time – if your doc warns of prediabetes take them seriously and change your lifestyle – losing the feeling in your toes fucking sucks.
Can just spiral as well. Combine smoking with diabetes and you can start kissing your toes and fingers goodbye due to lack of circulation. By the end, my mom had half a right foot by her late 50s also can cause the fine vessels in your eyes to basically start having micro holes in them that won’t heal and she was getting a shot in each eye every 2 months to keep what vision she had since the bleeding would cause clouds and pressure changes so often it would change her prescription by the week
The body’s inability to regulate your blood sugar level causes a lot of damage to the circulatory system. We think of our circulatory system as a way to bring blood and oxygen to our various body parts, but it does so much more than that. Blood delivers immune system cells, delivers hydrating fluids, and carries away cellular waste.
Patients with diabetes face a steady decline in circulatory system health, which leads to degraded function in all of these supporting areas. Eventually, patients see such degraded function that the tissues in their extremities — which are the hardest for our circulatory system to reach — start to break down due to wear and tear that can’t be repaired.
Then, if something as simple as a minor infection occurs, the circulatory system can’t deliver important immune system support, and the infection gets worse and worse. Eventually, doctors have a choice: let the infection spread and kill the patient, or cut the limb off.
It really is a sad and tragic thing that happens to people, and for most it is entirely preventable.
Basically, blood “circulation” diminishes to the extremities and tissues die.
In some cases, they “rot” away.
Diabetes is in our family, a “genetic predisposition.”
I was young (and “invincible” as youth we typically think we are) and never expected I would be subject to its predation.
However, this was a big mistake on my part.
Now I experience symptoms, and must take daily meds to “help” hold it in abeyance.
“Genes” can be a real bitch.
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