Your Skin Is Unable to Protect You as Well When You're a Diabetic

Your skin is your body’s largest organ. The purpose of your skin is to keep you safe. The construction of your skin has three parts. The top is known as your epidermis. The next layer is the dermis - and finally, you have the fat section that makes up your inner skin.

When it’s healthy, your skin does a good job of preventing toxins on the outside of your body from making their way inside your body and possibly making you sick or injuring you.

Without your skin, you would quickly succumb to whatever wanted to invade your body. Besides toxin protection, your body’s skin works to keep you safe from the sun. It also cools you off in the summer and warms you in the winter.

This organ acts as a message center alerting your body to pain, or to temperature changes. When your skin is cared for and healthy, it’s your first line of defense. Your skin is an immune system aid.

It stands guard for you against bacteria that would try to sneak into your body. But it also helps keep moisture within your body. If you’re being squished against something, your skin delivers a message that it’s being compressed and alerts you in order to protect your organs from harmful pressure.

Your skin is fluidly active, stretching as you bend or walk, stand or sit. When you have diabetes, your skin can’t do the job it would normally do correctly. In fact, the skin is often the first noticeable symptom of diabetes.

You might notice that cuts or wounds on the skin just aren’t healing the way that they used to. Diabetes causes problems for the skin because it can dry it out. The higher your blood sugar levels, the more issues you’ll have with dry skin.

This happens because diabetes pulls the hydration out of your skin. As a result, it becomes dry. If your skin becomes too dry from diabetes, it will start to crack. At this point, your skin is no longer forming an effective barrier against outside threats.

You’re then at risk for bacterial infections - including some serious ones. These infections can start at one place on the body and quickly move to other areas. The pigmentation of your skin can change as a result of diabetes and this can impair your skin’s ability to protect you from the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

Diabetes can cause you to develop patches of discoloration on your skin and these can vary in color. You might first dismiss these as just a collection of bumps or a spot. But these patches which are a direct result of diabetes can turn soft skin hard.

It can also make your skin painful to the touch. You may notice that your skin itches a lot when you have these patches. Because of these patches, your skin is then more susceptible to wounds as well as sun damage.

Skin that doesn’t retain its correct thickness is also a problem that diabetes causes. It can lead to the skin on your body thickening more than it should. It can feel like you have extra layers of skin in certain areas.

Some people with diabetes compare the difficulty of dealing with this part of diabetes to having sandpaper patches on their body. As a result of that thickening, the skin will tighten and can restrict your movements.

This thickened skin can make the nerve endings less sensitive to pain or pressure points. Many people with diabetes first develop this condition on their hands and then slowly lose the ability to use their fingers the way that they once did.

The worst thing about this side effect of diabetes on the skin is that the thickening doesn’t just stop with your hands. It can progress. When the skin begins to thicken on your arms, you can have difficulty moving them.

In some cases, the condition can appear on the torso and the face as well. If it becomes too severe, you can lose your mobility in some limbs. When it’s healthy, your skin is smooth and trouble free, but diabetes can make problems appear without warning.

These problems can be things like sudden lesions or blistered skin. Even if you haven’t done anything that would warrant the blistered skin, it can still occur. These blisters can spontaneously show up as a cluster or you may have them as single blisters.

You may not even be aware when these first develop. The reason for that is because of the diabetes, your skin won’t give the signal that there’s a blister. You won’t feel them. You’ll just notice them if you see them.

Some of these blisters can be small in size but others can be quite large. Diabetics who have developed neuropathy are more likely to experience these blisters than diabetics who haven’t.

If you do notice that you have one, the blister and the area will need to be treated so that it doesn’t lead to more complications. These blisters are always a sign that you have poor diabetes management.

Your skin can’t protect you as well when you have diabetes because of the lack of proper blood flow to this important and largest organ. When you have diabetes, you just don’t get the same amount of blood flow that you used to get.

So as a result of this, you can develop skin that can becomes scaly with random patches of red, or purplish bumps. These bumps may or may not itch and scratching them can cause them to spread.

It’s true that if you have diabetes, your skin is going to be under attack from the disease. But you can prevent some of the more serious issues by keeping the right blood glucose level. When you take care of your diabetes, your skin is then able to take care of you.