Diabetes and and Personal Injury

We've written a lot about pre-existing conditions. They can have a big impact on personal injury cases.

The damages in any personal injury case--regardless of whether there are pre-existing conditions--equal the delta between what life was like before and after an injury.

Right now we have a number of cases for clients with Type 2 diabetes. There are a lot of different symptoms that can be caused by diabetes.

It's important to understand the interplay between diabetes and injuries from a car wreck. And to be able to explain why outcomes can be so much worse as a result of the interplay.

Diabetes is associated with impaired bone and soft-tissue healing.

Peripheral neuropathy and vascular disease can compound problems. A diabetic plaintiff may require longer rehabilitation or experience complications that a metabolically healthy person would not.

All of this applies to musculoskeletal injuries. It also applies to brain injuries. Diabetes causes symptoms in some people that are similar to what people experience after concussion. And diabetes can make functional recovery harder through several parallel pathways.

Imagine a person who suffers a concussion. Concussion symptoms include headaches, poor sleep, fatigue, dizziness, and decreased exercise tolerance.

Diabetes may add glucose fluctuations, peripheral neuropathy, impaired balance, visual problems, vascular disease, fatigue, or reduced exercise capacity.

Those factors associated with diabetes can interfere with the activities used to rehabilitate concussion: sleep normalization, aerobic conditioning, vestibular therapy, cognitive activity, and progressive return to normal routines.

Diabetes frequently explains why collisions have unusually serious consequences.

Of course defense experts are quick to characterize post-collision disability as “diabetic” rather than traumatic.

The strongest way to address that usually isn’t to deny the significance of diabetes. It is to establish the pre-injury phenotype:

What was this particular person’s diabetes actually doing to them the day before the collision?

And then compare that baseline with the post-collision phenotype.

In what ways were symptoms, restrictions, activity-level, etc. different after the collision?

This delta measures the loss.