Study includes skeletal problems to the long list of type II diabetes complications

If you think complications from type II diabetes are only limited to vascular and heart disease, eye problems, nerve damage, kidney disease, hearing problems and Alzheimer's disease, you're wrong. Now a new study suggests you can add bone deterioration to the already long list of type II diabetes complications.

A Mayo Clinic study published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research has confirmed what physicians have always suspected and assumed.

What’s that?

The fact that osteoporosis (bone deterioration) may be one of the complications from type II diabetes.

Bone deterioration – one of the complications from type II diabetes

Science Daily reports the Mayo Clinic researchers validated that assumption in a clinical study of 60 postmenopausal women, 30 of whom had type II diabetes.

Using a new tool (OsteoProbe), researchers performed micro indentation testing of the tibia (actually causing a microscopic crack) to measure bone material strength.

They found that, compared to the control group of women aged 50 to 80, the group with type II diabetes had significantly lower bone material strength.

There was no difference between the micro architecture of the bone or bone density between the two groups.

That’s not all.

The study showed that diabetic women with lower bone material strength had also experienced higher levels of hyperglycemia (high blood sugar level) over the previous ten years, suggesting potential detrimental effects of poor glucose control on bone quality.

Why are these findings significant?

In the Science Daily report, senior author of the study, Dr Sundeep Khosla says that “the skeleton needs to be recognised as another important target of diabetes complications.”

Co-author of the study Dr Shreyasee Amin said new technology may help in studying other conditions where fractures occur at higher than expected bone density.

Dr Amin believes this’ll be especially relevant to many forms of autoimmune arthritis where glucocorticoids are used, such as in rheumatoid arthritis.

While researchers concluded that more research needs to be done, as this was a small study in a limited population, these findings are certainly significant to the fight against diabetes.

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