Are your feet showing symptoms of diabetes?
Diabetes – type-1, type-2 or gestational – is a common chronic condition across the world that affects millions and raises risk of other chronic conditions of the heart, and sometimes of even limb amputation. When the body becomes insulin resistant or pancreas produces the hormone in small quantities, blood sugar levels can increase drastically which can result in multiple complications. And when the blood sugar levels increase abnormally, your body shows multiple signs – the tell-tate symptoms of diabetes. These could include frequent urination – mostly at night, excessive hunger and thirst, exhaustion, dry skin, unexplained weight loss, blurry vision or tingling sensation in the limbs.
Diabetes symptoms, however, are not limited to this. The lower part of your body – feet and legs – could be showing certain telltale signs of the condition that you could be missing. Take a look at the most common signs of diabetes that could be showing on your feet and legs.
- Tingling sensation in feet: Sometimes, while walking, one may not be able to feel their feet or can experience numbness. This could be happening due to high blood sugar levels. Tingling sensation and numbness in feet is also a symptom of peripheral diabetic neuropathy.
- No pain sensation despite injuries: Be it ulcers or any injury, patients with diabetic neuropathy fail to experience pain in their legs and feet. This happens due to the nerve damage caused by high blood sugar levels which could mitigate the discomfort caused by injuries often resulting in major damage.
- Pain in leg muscles while walking: Diabetics can experience pain in the leg muscles after walking a certain distance due to improper blood circulation. This happens due to blocked arteries that are commonly found in diabetics – a condition that is also responsible for the slow healing of wounds.
- Risk of infections: Corns and calluses are also a common occurrence in diabetes patients. However, due to improper blood circulation, absence of pain and high blood sugar levels, these can often go unnoticed and more prone to risk of infections. Sores or ulcers, too, are more likely to get infected in diabetics, and due to low pace of healing, the same can spread to surrounding tissues, thereby resulting in damage.