You can stop the pain and improve your quality of life by supplementing with specific nutrients proven to support healthy nerves. Add the following nutrients to your current treatment regimen and experience for yourself the healing power of food.

1. Acetyl-L-Carnitine (ALC)

ALC is an amino acid that increases energy production by supplying nerve cells with fatty acids. The more energy a nerve cell can produce, the better it can regenerate and function.

Supplementing with it has been shown to improve pain and physical strength in diabetics. All it takes is a daily dose of 1000 mg taken on an empty stomach to stop the pain.

2. Lipoic Acid

Lipoic acid is a powerful antioxidant found in leafy green vegetables and dark colored fruits. It is recognized by herbalist as a powerful nutrient for prevention of diabetes complications, including nerve damage.

Diabetic patients treated with 600 mg for 60 days showed significant improvements in reported pain from peripheral neuropathy. The “R” type of lipoic acid was used in the study. This is the active form preferred by the body.

3. Pregnenolone

Pregnenolone is best known as the “mother” hormone because it’s the precursor to all steroids such as testosterone and estrogen. However, it was first identified as a neuro-active steroid that is essential to the structure of nerve cell membranes.

This is important to diabetics because blood glucose damages cell membranes and disrupts normal communication between nerve cells. The structural damage to nerve cell membranes results in chronic pain and debilitation.

Pregnenolone can help repair and regenerate cell membranes. For most diabetics, the effective dose is between 50 to 100 mg/day.

4. Omega-3 Fats

Nerve endings require specific types of unsaturated fats called omega-3 fatty acids. Found in cold-water fish, the omega-3 fats insulate nerves and help conduct electrical signals.

Studies have shown that omega-3 fats are able to reduce nerve damage caused by high blood sugar and reduce pain. Take 4000 mg/day of omega-3 fats.

All around the world, hundreds of millions of people face long bouts of major depression. For many people, life conditions are depressing, but for up to 48% of diabetics, the underlying cause of depression may be poorly regulated blood sugar levels.

Depression is thought to be twice as common in diabetics as in the population generally. Different factors can contribute to the development of depression and includes:

• emotions
• environmental factors
• biology

Scientists at the diabetes specialty clinic at the SMS Hospitals in Jaipur, India studied fifty adults who had type 2 diabetes and a control group of thirty adults who were diabetes-free. They excluded anyone who had a previous history of depression or any other psychiatric illness, history of addiction or substance, high blood pressure, or any medical condition except diabetes. (The volunteers in the control had none of these conditions.) Using a standard psychological exam for measuring depression, the researchers then assessed the psychological status of the eighty people in the study.

The researchers found that 46% of the type 2 diabetics in this study suffered depression. Of all the diabetics in the study:

• 12% were were suffering from mild depression
• 16% from moderate depression, and
• 18% from severe depression

There was a trend suggesting higher blood sugars tracked to the most severe depression, but the study group was too small to establish definitive statistics. The average fasting blood sugar level in the type 2 diabetics who did not display depression was 123 mg/dL (6.8 mmol/L). The average fasting blood sugar level among the diabetics who had depression was 151 mg/dL (8.4 mmol/L).

Researchers also tested mental skills in both groups. Diabetics did not do as well as non-diabetics. Diabetics did worse than non-diabetics on every measure of mental ability the researchers tested but especially in tests that involved:

• counting numbers forwards
• counting numbers backwards, and
• recognizing symbols

Diabetics did relatively well in tests that required the use of language, but relatively poorly in tests that required the ability to learn new information quickly. There was no clear-cut relationship between depression and other forms of mental decline.

The researchers admitted that they had not studied enough people to reach definitive, sweeping conclusions. This and other studies, however, suggest that keeping blood sugar levels down goes a long way toward keeping mental faculties sharp.

Although this study showed 46% of those tested suffered some degree of depression, it also showed that lower blood sugar levels gave a lesser degree and chance of depression. Unfortunately depression makes people less motivated to eat healthy foods and to exercise, which means higher blood sugar levels.

Tight control of systolic blood pressure (SBP) to a target of less than 130 mmHg in diabetics with coronary artery disease (CAD) does not significantly reduce the incidence of cardiovascular (CV) events compared with usual control, and is associated with increased all-cause mortality, shows an analysis of INVEST.

In INVEST (International Verapamil SR ??” trandolapril Study), patients with diabetes and CAD were randomly assigned to receive antihypertensive therapy with either a calcium-channel blocker or a beta blocker, plus an ACE inhibitor and/or a thiazide diuretic. In extended follow-up of 6400 patients enrolled in the trial, those who achieved SBPs lower than 130 mmHg had cardiovascular outcomes equivalent to those who achieved SBPs between 130 and 140 mmHg.

But a subanalysis of 5077 patients from the USA showed that the tight BP control strategy was associated with an adjusted hazard ratio (HR) of 1.15 (p=0.036) for all-cause mortality compared with usual control, defined as a SBP lower than 140 mm Hg.

“We wonder whether it’s time to rethink lower BP goals in patients with diabetes and CAD,” said Rhonda Cooper-DeHoff from the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, USA, who presented the data during a late-breaking clinical trials session at the 2010 annual scientific sessions of the American College of Cardiology in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

The findings appear to contravene the position of the American Diabetes Association, which has previously issued a position statement saying that “there is no threshold value for BP [in diabetics], and risk continues to decrease well into the normal range.”

INVEST was designed to determine whether lowering SBP below 130 mmHg could provide additional CV benefits, particularly among diabetic patients with CAD. The international trial enrolled 22,576 patients with CAD and hypertension, and randomly assigned them to receive either verapamil SR plus trandolapril and the thiazide diuretic hydrochlorothiazide [HCTZ], or atenolol plus HCTZ and trandolapril. Trandolapril was recommended for all diabetic patients in the study.

The analysis focused on mortality rates among a US cohort of diabetic patients followed for an extended period, from September 1997 through November 2008. To evaluate the effects of very low SBP, the authors further categorized on-treatment SBP in increments of 5 mmHg.

During the extended follow-up period of 22,700 patient-years, the investigators found that, as predicted, patients whose BP was not controlled on therapy had an approximately 50% higher risk for a composite endpoint of death, nonfatal myocardial infarction (MI) or nonfatal stroke compared with those in the usual-control group. There were no significant differences between the tight- or usual-control groups with regard to either nonfatal MI of nonfatal stroke.

But in a Cox regression analysis of all-cause mortality, both the 110 to less than 115 mmHg and the less than 110 mmHg SBP categories were associated with increased risk for death. Other factors associated with increased mortality risk were age, race, peripheral arterial disease, coronary heart failure, US residency, renal impairment, left-ventricular hypertrophy, and transient ischemia.

MedWire (www.medwire-news.md) is an independent clinical news service provided by Current Medicine Group, a trading division of Springer Healthcare Limited. © Springer Healthcare Ltd; 2010

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