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Does diabetes hide osteoarthritis pain?

If you’re over 55, chances are you or someone you know has osteoarthritis, and maybe diabetes too. Lots of people have both. Osteoarthritis can really hurt. If you have osteoarthritis, you know EXACTLY what we mean…..or maybe you don’t. Would it interest you to know that even with severe osteoarthritis that the doctor can see on their x-ray, some people don’t hurt much at all? Doctors have been wondering for a long time why this happens. Well, we at The Arthritis Research Institute of America, Inc may have an answer and we’re so interested that we published a paper outlining our theory in the journal Medical Hypotheses.

Osteoarthritis generally starts giving people problems around age 55, right about the same time diabetes, if you have it, starts affecting the body as well. In fact, diabetes can affect the body by damaging the nerves that register sensation, especially in the feet. This damage can work its way up the body, affecting the nerves along the way. When the nerves get damaged, they can’t pick up the sensations, even sensations like pain.

So you see where we’re going here. If you have osteoarthritis, which is painful, and you have diabetes, which can interfere with your ability to feel pain, the diabetes could actually make it so you don’t feel the osteoarthritis pain. This could be big news for the people who have both, as well as the doctors who take care of them. We’ll use our extensive data to test this hypothesis and see if it may be accurate. But for now, we’ve got people thinking about it! You can read it for yourself on our website by clicking here.

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