Diabetes and Bones: An Underappreciated Complication

The possible culprit in the decrease in bone quality could be a familiar one — the accumulation of advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) that underlies many complications, such as retinopathy and peripheral neuropathy. Rubin and her colleagues wondered whether the increase in glycation in diabetes patients with the “proteins in the collagen becoming encrusted in sugar” could be related to the lower strength of the bones. “We used a skin test to see what the accumulation of these sugar glycation products was in the skin. We found that the more they were present in skin, the weaker the bone material quality was in the diabetic patients. But in the healthy patients, that relationship didn’t exist at all,” Rubin says. Diabetes can be weakening the skeleton despite apparently good bone mineral density scores. Fortunately, standard osteoporosis treatments appear to be just as successful in patients with diabetes. http://endocrinenews.endocrine.org/diabetes-bones-underappreciated-complication/