Sparing the details, a colleague of mine recently had his big toe amputated due to diabetes. I wondered why being diabetic could lead to this as it’s common.
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When you have diabetes, your body doesn’t properly regulate blood sugar levels. This can be because your pancreas doesn’t produce enough insulin, or your body becomes resistant to insulin function. Either way, people with diabetes have chronically high blood sugar levels.
Sugar has an interesting effect on the insides of our veins and arteries. It causes them to become rough on the insides. This roughness causes fat to stick to the insides and form deposits. These fat deposits inhibit circulation.
So you start from an inability to regulate blood sugar, this causes high blood sugar, this causes damage to your circulatory system, and this causes fat to build up. As you can see, this is a cascading failure. But why does it affect your legs?
Our heart is in our chest, but our legs are down near the ground. This makes it hard to get good circulation to begin with, but the damage due to the cascading failures above makes this circulation less efficient.
Poor circulation has its own set of cascading consequences. Our circulatory system carries nutrients to our cells. It also brings healing agents and carries away dead cells and pathogens that have been killed by our immune system.
A body part without good circulation is like a car without oil, fuel, or air intake. Over time, this lack of supply takes its toll on the body parts it affects the most. Our legs happen to be particularly susceptible to the cascading effects of diabetes.
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