IF you catch yourself feeling dizzy or faint when you stand up, you could be a risk of diabetes in the future, a new study suggests. Dizziness can be triggered by neuropathy , a type of nerve damage that can occur if you have diabetes . Hungarian researchers estimated that people at risk of type 2 diabetes are up to six times more likely to have neuropathy.
They also found that patients can show subtle signs of this damage years before their diabetes becomes fully developed. Professor Anna Körei, from Semmelweis University, said: “Our aim is not just to identify individuals with carbohydrate metabolism disorders, but to detect those at risk as early as possible." The scientists claim their findings could be used to track signs of neuropathy in patients at risk of diabetes and then either slow or prevent the nerve damage from occurring.
Neuropathy is one of the long-term complications of diabetes. High blood sugar levels associated with the disease can injure nerves throughout your body. Over the long term, this can lead to nerve damage and different symptoms depending on the nerves affected.
It commonly results in peripheral neuropathy, which causes numbness, tingling, burning sensations, aching, cramps, and weakness in the feet and hands. This condition can eventually spread to the entire limb. More than five million Brits are thought to be living with diabetes, of which an estimated 850,000 are unaware they have the condition.
And two million Brits are believed to be at.
