Dry skin affects diabetics more than most people. Nerve damage, common in diabetes, disrupts the impulses that tell the skin to sweat, resulting in drier than normal skin. If you have high blood sugar levels, your body tries to remove sugar from the blood by increasing urine output, which leads to dehydration. Dehydration also causes skin to dry out. Dry skin cracks more easily, allowing a portal for infection, which also occurs more commonly in diabetics. Dry skin can cause several symptoms in diabetes.
Itching
Dry skin itches. When you scratch the skin, you can cause small breaks in the skin that can become infected. Rather than scratching itchy areas, apply lotion or cream to reduce the dryness. Don't put lotion between the toes, the Cleveland Clinic advises. Fungal infections grow well in dark, moist areas. If an infection develops, high blood sugar interferes with the immune system's ability to fight the infection.
Poor Healing
Dry skin can occur because of poor circulation, which leads to decreased blood supply to tissues, Karen Chapman Navakofski, professor of nutrition at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, states on the website Diabetes Life Lines. Injured tissues require a good blood supply to heal, so decreased blood flow results in poor healing when small cracks and breaks develop in dry skin. Poor healing allows small injuries to develop into bigger, more serious ones and also increases the chance that infection will develop.
Open Sores
When dry skin develops, particularly on the feet, where nerve damage in often severe, small cracks may not be noticed. Because diabetes often leads to numbness along nerves, called peripheral neuropathy, small cracks can turn into large open sores before they're noticed. An ulcer, a deep eroded area in the skin, can increase the chance of developing a foot infection. Because diabetics also have poor blood circulation,especially to the extremities, ulcers heal slowly. A severe infection can lead to amputation of toes, feet or legs. Diabetics are 30 times more likely to need a foot or leg amputated than people without diabetes, The Merck Manuals Online Medical Library warns.
References
- National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disorders: Prevent Diabetes Problems: Keep Your feet and Skin Healthy
- The Merck Manuals Online Medical Library: Diabetes Mellitus
- American Diabetes Association: Skin Complications
- Diabetes Life Lines: Diabetes--The Medical Perspective
- Cleveland Clinic: Foot and Skin Related Complications of Diabetes
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