Divorced men at highest amputation risk among diabetics, study finds

Divorced men are at the highest risk among people with diabetes of having some or all of their feet and legs amputated because of the disease, research has found.

People with diabetes who are divorced are two-thirds (67%) more likely to have to undergo a lower limb amputation than those who are married. Men are at 57% greater risk than women of that fate.

The trends emerged from research conducted among 66,569 people with diabetes in Sweden, findings from which will be presented at a conference of specialists in the disease.

The need for lower limb amputation is a serious but common side-effect of diabetes and a risk run by people with the type 1 and type 2 forms of the disease. On average, 184 people a week in England have some part of a lower limb removed surgically to stop infection spreading and killing them. The number of people with diabetes in Britain recently reached a record high of about 5.1 million.

The authors of the study said they could not be sure why divorcees of both sexes ran such a greater risk than married people, but speculated that this “may be due to a change in self-care and food habits observed in people when they divorce and are more likely to be living alone”.

“Specifically with men, this is often related to more social isolation, with a secondary effect of low physical activity,” they added.

Lasantha Wijesinghe, a consultant vascular surgeon in England who performs lower limb amputations, said they were usually necessary because the person’s life was at risk because of sepsis, the body’s life-threatening reaction to an infection.

“Some of the people [with diabetes] that we perform a lower limb amputation on are diabetic and have no other