FROZEN SHOULDER AND DIABETES

- July 12, 2020

Almost everyone knows about Frozen shoulders. Frozen shoulder as the name suggests, is a condition where your shoulders freeze which basically means the mobility and the functions of the shoulders are lost. It is otherwise known as adhesive capsulitis. But did you know that there is a huge connection between frozen shoulder and diabetes?

Researchers have found that almost 30% of the people who are diabetic are very much prone to develop this condition sooner or later in their lives.

Alright, so you must be wondering what does frozen shoulders have to do with diabetes?

Well, to understand this I’d like to give you a very brief idea about diabetes in case you don’t know already.

Diabetes is a chronic condition associated with abnormally high levels of sugar (glucose) in the blood. Insulin produced by the pancreas lowers blood glucose. Absence or insufficient production of insulin, or an inability of the body to properly use insulin causes diabetes.

I am going to illustrate this with a picture:

In this diagram, a girl is taking carbohydrate as her diet. After digestion, the complex carbohydrates would ultimately breakdown into glucose which is a simple carb.

And then those glucose would enter the bloodstream. Now the glucose which are present in her bloodstream should go to her liver cells and also to the other parts of her body. Let’s say she’s diabetic. Now her body is not able to produce insulin or there is insufficiency of insulin.

With the above picture you can see that the insulin is the doorway to the cells which basically means cells can intake the glucose only if the insulin is present. If there’s no insulin, there’d be no uptake of glucose inside the cells.

Now that there’s no glucose uptake by the cells, there’d be an increased level of glucose in the blood.

So when you’re diabetic, you have increased blood glucose level and this glucose would combine with the collagen protein of your joint capsule. This is called non enzymatic glycosylation. This would result in the formation of non‐enzymatic glycosylation products, which further give rise to advanced glycosylation end‐products (AGEs). These AGEs increase cross‐linking in collagen, tendons and ligaments, making these structures stiffer and weaker. So that would result in limited range of motion

of the shoulder joint.