When people with type 2 diabetes lose muscle strength, their muscle cells—especially the endurance type—don’t produce energy as well, which might explain why they get tired more easily during physical activity.

People with type 2 diabetes who lose muscle tend to lose a specific kind called 'slow-twitch' muscle first, which is different from regular aging muscle loss or muscle loss from not moving much. This suggests diabetes-related muscle loss might be its own unique condition.

Muscle loss in people with type 2 diabetes happens even in younger adults, not just older people — so it's not just aging causing it, and might be due to different reasons than regular age-related muscle loss.

Doctors use different rules to diagnose weak muscles in people with type 2 diabetes, but those rules give wildly different results — from 7% to 58% of patients. That confusion means we probably need better, diabetes-specific rules to spot this problem accurately.