To determine if this is a possibility, Dr. Martin Gulliford and colleagues looked at the medical records of over 2,600 patients with diabetes beginning well before they were diagnosed. All of these patients were considered to have had pre-diabetes, a condition that marks the beginning of diabetes-like problems. During this time, "individual subjects have normal glucose tolerance or varying degrees of hyperglycemia [high blood sugar]," write the study authors in Diabetes Care. In other words, these patients' bodies are just beginning to have problems processing sugar normally. Full-blown diabetes causes much more significant problems with blood sugar.
Comparing these patients with a sample of 5,300 patients who never developed diabetes, Gulliford found that those who had been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome at some point were over 35 percent more likely to later be diagnosed with diabetes.
"Hyperglycemia and associated abnormalities may contribute to…local peripheral nerve disorders before the diagnosis of diabetes," writes Gulliford.
The researchers state that the sample size may be too small to draw any large conclusions. However, these findings do suggest that even pre-diabetes can adversely affect the body years before diabetes is diagnosed.
