Impact of treatments for painful diabetic polyneuropathies on patients

Patients with painful diabetic polyneuropathy (PDN) commonly report neuropathic pain symptoms. Partanen and colleagues found that amongst 132 patients newly diagnosed with non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM), 7–13 % reported pain and paraesthesia [1]. In the same patient group 10 years post-diagnosis, 20 % reported pain and 33 % reported paraesthesia. In a study involving 2,610 NIDDM patients, Sorensen and colleagues found that painful neuropathy was present in 11.4 % of those who had a vibration perception threshold ≥30 V and in 3.3 % of those who had a vibration perception threshold <30 [2]. A cross-sectional study conducted in the UK reported that 26.4 % of 269 NIDDM patients with PDN experienced some degree of pain, and amongst those classified as having no neuropathy according to the Toronto Clinical Neuropathy Scoring System, 7.4 % reported pain [3]. Copyright © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.