Do you feel dizzy or faint when you stand up? You could be at risk of developing diabetes in the future, study suggests.
Hungarian researchers say they have discovered that patients at risk of type 2 diabetes are up to six times more likely to suffer nerve damage affecting the heart, related to the condition.
Signs of this damage, called neuropathy, include feeling faint and dizzy, and can be detected “several years” before diabetes is diagnosed, experts say.
Neuropathy is a medical term that means nerve damage and is a known complication of diabetes.
However, researchers at Semmelweis University say that patients show subtle signs of this damage even before diabetes fully develops.
Do you feel dizzy or faint when you stand up? You could be at risk of diabetes, study suggests (file image)
They claim their findings could be used to track signs of neuropathy in patients at risk of diabetes and then slow or prevent nerve damage from occurring.
Neuropathy is a common complication of diabetes due to the way high blood sugar levels damage the small blood vessels that feed the nerves.
In the long term, this can cause nerve damage and cause different symptoms depending on which nerves are affected.
It commonly results in what is called peripheral neuropathy which causes numbness, tingling, burning sensations, pain, cramps and weakness in the feet and hands that can eventually spread to the entire limb.
Other types of neuropathy that diabetics can suffer from include problems with their senses, the signal their organs receive, and the ability to control their hands.
In his study, published in the journal Frontiers in endocrinologyThe researchers found that people at higher risk for diabetes were 5.9 times more likely to have a type called parasympathetic neuropathy compared to healthy people.
Parasympathetic neuropathy is a type of damage to the nerves that govern how our body rests, for example sending signals to slow the heartbeat.
Cardiac autonomic neuropathy (CAN), a type of heart-related nerve damage, was specifically highlighted in the study as more common in the diabetes risk group, again 5.9 times.
Symptoms of CAN include the inability to exercise for more than a very short period of time and low blood pressure which can make you feel dizzy or faint when you wake up, according to the NHS.
The researchers said they also found a higher incidence of sensory neuropathy in the at-risk group, but added that this was observed in the study patients.
Study author Anna Körei, assistant professor of medicine and oncology at Semmelweis, said: “We were looking for signs of neuropathy in patients with normal blood glucose levels but at increased risk of developing diabetes.
“We have gone back in time and analyzed an earlier stage, in which risk factors could be present but there are no clear signs of (pre)diabetes.”
The study compared the health test results of 44 people assessed as being at high risk of developing diabetes and 28 healthy controls.
Participants had their heartbeats measured, as well as tests on how their bodies reacted to sensations such as pain, burning and numbness.
Concluding their study, the authors said their findings warrant further research.
The authors acknowledge that their study had several limitations, the most important being the overall small number of participants.
Another factor was that although participants were asked to stop taking medications that could influence the results, the authors could not guarantee that they had followed these instructions.
Approximately five million people in the UK live with diabetes, of whom an estimated 850,000 are unaware they have the disease.
A recent report from Diabetes UK suggests there has been a staggering 39 per cent rise in type 2 diabetes in people under 40, in a trend attributed to rising levels of obesity.
There is no cure for diabetes-related neuropathy, however, there are medications available to combat the symptoms it causes.
Problems with the nerves that help detect foot pain is one reason why diabetics are advised to check their feet frequently, as they may not feel wounds that can become dangerously infected.