Skin Blood Flow in Diabetic Dermopathy

A new method of screening for diabetic neuropathy using laser Doppler and photoplethysmography

“…Wigington showed that finger blood flow in patients with diabetes was lower than in those without it [20], a result similar to ours using PPG. Though our proposed ratio method cannot discriminate between finger and toe neuropathy, it has the potential to become an effective, new screening tool for the detection of diabetic neuropathy as it most commonly affects feet before hands [3,20].…”

“…Furthermore, there was a significant decrease in the blood volume changes of the neuropathic group compared with that of the control group in the fingers (p \ 0.001) and a significant increase in the toes (p \ 0.001). The above finding is consistent with the study wherein 76% of diabetics with neuropathy showed smaller finger pulp and larger toe pulp blood flows than non-diabetics [20]. Therefore, this finding not only validated previous studies [6, 8-10, 13, 16, 20] but confirmed our assumption that the toe blood volume changes in the neuropathic group would be larger than those in the nonneuropathic group.…”

<p>Clinical Significance of Diabetic Dermatopathy</p>

“……”

Skin blood flow in necrobiosis lipoidica diabeticorum*

“…In another previous study, we measured blood flow in lesions of diabetic dermopathy (DD), which was thought to be an ischemic consequence of diabetic microangiopathy. 20 However, we found that blood flow was high in DD lesions thus negating a direct relationship between DD and microvascular disease. In the current study, we measured blood flow in NLD lesions and compared these values to those measured in nondiabetic subjects, diabetic patients with dermopathy, and diabetic patients with no skin abnormalities.…”