My 15 year old son (diabetic since 4 years old) has extreme thigh pain. He has had 2 MRI’S, X-ray’s, and a bone scan. Could this be neuropathy?

Neuropathy with pain is really very uncommon indeed in young diabetics even when they have a long history of poor control, although there is an entity called ‘Acute painful neuropathy in diabetes mellitus’ which seems to occur in men who have recently lost a lot of weight; but which is predominantly in the lower part of the leg and largely unaccompanied by other neurological evidence of nerve involvement. In these circumstances I would want to be sure that this pain is not a reflection of stress, perhaps some event at school or home, perhaps a general weariness with having to cope with diabetes appropriate in a teenager, or perhaps even an oblique request to move to an insulin pump. The best person to start to try to evaluate and disentangle such a problem would be the Medical Social Worker in your son’s Diabetes Care Team.

Of course there are other causes of limb pain; but it sounds as though these have been diligently excluded.

DOB