A constant feeling of strange tingling and numbness along a person’s legs may be far more common in some parts of the U.S. than previously thought, a new study suggests Wednesday. Researchers have found evidence that a significant majority of older adults in Flint, Michigan, suffer from neuropathy, an unpleasant condition caused by nerve damage that can increase the risk of other serious health problems such as infections and falls. Often these patients didn’t even know they had it.
The research was led by scientists from the University of Michigan. In 2021 they started the Flint Neuropathy Studyin the hope of better understanding a form of the disease distal symmetrical polyneuropathy, or DSP. DSP is considered the most common form of peripheral neuropathy (outside the brain) and is characterized by numbness, tingling, and pain that begins in the feet but can spread to other areas.
They also wanted to focus specifically on Flint because such communities typically don’t receive attention from the scientific world. The city infamously suffered a grave Public health crisis in the 2010s, exposing residents to potentially dangerous levels of lead and pathogens Legionella Bacteria in your drinking water.
“Most well-conducted research studies examining how many people suffer from neuropathy and the impact it has on their lives have overlooked places like Flint. Minorities and low-income communities are often underrepresented in clinical research,” said Melissa Elafros, a UM researcher and lead researcher on the project, in an email to Gizmodo. “That’s why we launched the Flint Neuropathy Study to find out whether what is known about neuropathy applies to our patients in Flint.”
Elafros and her team asked people over 40 who received routine outpatient care at Hurley Medical Center in Flint to participate in the study. Two hundred people agreed to enroll, while 169 were able to complete all three study visits. The first peer-reviewed results of the ongoing study were published on Wednesday in the journal Neurology.
DSP can have many causes, but diabetes is a known risk factor for it. And since lower-income minority communities tend to have higher rates of diabetes, the researchers assumed the same would be true for neuropathy. But even they were surprised at how common it was among their patients.
“In the United States, the accepted prevalence rate for neuropathy is 13.5%, meaning that out of every 100 people, 13 have neuropathy. Among the adults who took part in our research study, we found that 73 out of 100 suffered from neuropathy. “That’s a huge difference!” said Elafros. Even worse, three-quarters of these patients were completely unaware of their condition because they had not been previously diagnosed.
“Because there is no cure for neuropathy, the majority of our treatment involves controlling pain and counseling patients to prevent falls and foot trauma, which can lead to lacerations, infections and, even worse, amputations,” Elafros noted. “If patients and their doctors don’t recognize that someone has neuropathy, none of this happens.”
The results are from a sample of patients in a single outpatient clinic. Therefore, it is possible that the actual rate of neuropathy is lower in older adults in Flint. However, given the large discrepancy between their numbers and national estimates, the team believes it is likely that neuropathy and related conditions are significantly underestimated and untreated in many parts of the country, similar to Flint. And as noted, participants in the study had high rates of often uncontrolled diabetes and obesity, for example, which may be the reason for the high rate of neuropathies in this group.
“This study makes clear that what we know about neuropathy and the number of people affected by it is likely not reflective of the entire U.S. population,” she said.
The team is still working with patients and physicians at Hurley Medical Center to learn more about why diabetes is often uncontrolled in people and looking for ways to improve screening for neuropathy during primary care visits. Last year also Elafros and her team receive They are receiving additional funding from the National Institutes of Health to expand their project, and they have already begun working with primary care providers at McLaren Flint Hospital to study neuropathy rates and potential risk factors in patients there.
“We are working to reach out into the community to improve the quality of life for people with neuropathy and prevent vulnerable people from developing it,” Elafros said.