Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy: Comparison of Clinical and Electrophysiological Features in Patients with and without Diabetes

J Korean Assoc EMG Electrodiagn Med 2004;6(1):16-22.
Published online May 10, 2004.

Abstract

Objectives: There is growing evidence that idiopathic chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (I-CIDP) and polyneuropathy in patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) that meets the clinical and electrophysiological criteria for CIDP (DM-CIDP) have many similarities. We performed this study to determine whether a subset of DM-CIDP are similar to I-CIDP employing proposed clinical and electrophysiologic criteria for CIDP. Methods: We compared the clinical (age, sex, symptom duration, pattern, course, motor scale, sensory scale, total clinical scale, and M-Rankin score, etc.) and electrodiagnostic (routine nerve conduction studies including median, ulnar, peroneal, and posterior tibial nerves) features of 9 patients (M=5, F=4) with DM-CIDP to those of 11 patients (M=4, F=7) with I-CIDP. Results: The patients with DM-CIDP displayed clinical, electrophysiologic features that were similar to those in patients with I-CIDP. Conclusion: Our study showed the influences of diabetes in patients with CIDP are insignificant and DM-CIDP is electrophysiologically indistinguishable from idiopathic CIDP. It is important to separate immune-mediated, demyelinating polyneuropathy in diabetic patients (DM-CIDP) from axonal polyneuropathy because the former responds to immunomodulatory treatment.

Key Words: Diabetes mellitus, Polyneuropathy, Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, Immunomodulating therapy