Diabetic Amyotrophy

D iabetes mellitus is one of the oldest known diseases in the human race and is very common. There are probably about 650,000 diabetics in Great Britain but of these 250,000 '.lre likely to be undiagnosed. The precise incidence of neurological complications of diabetes is uncertain and there are several reasons for our uncertainty. Many diabetics of long standing develop neurological syndromes ~hioh may be purely objective and are never discovered because the patients are not s~bjected to frequent neurological examinatJ~n, even of the simplest kind. Others develop chsorders of the nervous system which are 0 ~ten then considered to be independent of the diabetes and purely coincidental. In a third group the presenting symptoms arise from neural complications and, for a long time, diabetes may never be suspected. Many members of our profession are still quite content to dismiss the possibility of diabetes in a Patient whose urine has been sugar free on a few occasions.