Pain, Numbness, and Tingling in Your Lower Legs? It Could Be Peripheral Neuropathy

When you receive a diabetes diagnosis, paying much closer attention to your health becomes paramount. As the more than 40 million Americans who have diabetes can attest, this chronic disease can impact you from head to toe — from vision loss to nerve damage in your lower legs and feet.

It’s this former complication — nerve damage in the form of diabetic peripheral neuropathy (PN) — that is one of the bigger concerns. PN affects about half of people with diabetes, and it can be a very serious and even limb-threatening complication.

Since November is National Diabetes Month, the team of skilled pain management specialists at Johnston Pain Management thought it was a great time to review diabetes-related peripheral neuropathy.

Here, we look at how diabetes leads to PN, the potential health problems that can arise, and how we can help relieve your symptoms.

Diabetes and nerve damage

As you likely already know, when you have Type 2 diabetes, your body is unable to properly regulate glucose levels in your blood thanks to insulin resistance and not enough insulin production to overcome the resistance.

One result of high blood sugar is nerve damage, as glucose damages the fragile blood vessels that deliver nutrients and oxygen to your peripheral nerves. This effect tends to occur in areas farthest from your heart, where your blood has a harder time circulating, such as in and out of your extremities.

So, many people with Type 2 diabetes develop PN in their lower legs and feet and, less commonly, in their arms and hands.

Signs of diabetic peripheral neuropathy

When the sensory nerves in your lower limbs are damaged due to high glucose levels, you can experience strange and uncomfortable sensations, including:

Numbness
Tingling
Pain, which is often described as shooting, burning, and stabbing
Muscle weakness

When these symptoms first develop, they can come and go. With time, the nerve damage can progress, and symptoms become more constant and severe.

Where we really get concerned is that PN can lead to diabetic foot ulcers, which are very dangerous complications that develop in about one-third of people with the disease. In about half of foot ulcers, wounds heal slowly, allowing infection to set in. Even more alarming, about 20% of these infections end in partial or complete amputation.

Key strategies for diabetes-related peripheral neuropathy

If you suspect that you’re starting to develop PN, we want you to see us right away. In the early stages, PN is far easier to treat, and we can work toward halting and even reversing the nerve damage.

To do this, we first recommend doubling down on your efforts to control your blood sugar levels, which you can do with your primary care provider.

Where we come in is to make you more comfortable if you’re dealing with neuropathic pain. There are many ways in which you can go about this, including:

Pain medicine, such as anti-seizure medications like gabapentin
Pain patches
Antidepressants
Physical therapy
Nerve blocks with anesthetic and anti-inflammatory agents
Peripheral nerve stimulation — we use electrical impulses to disrupt pain messaging
Relaxation techniques, such as deep breathing and meditation

We also recommend complementary therapies, such as massage therapy and medical acupuncture, which can both improve circulation.

As you can see, we’re not without options when it comes to managing and containing peripheral neuropathy related to diabetes.

To figure out which combination of treatments would work best for your peripheral neuropathy, please contact us at one of our conveniently located offices in Jacksonville, Hampstead, or New Bern, North Carolina, to schedule a consultation.