The peripheral neuropathy evaluation in an office-based neurology setting

Peripheral neuropathy is the most common neuromuscular disorder encountered in a neurologic practice. The evaluation of patients with suspected peripheral neuropathy can be a challenging endeavor for the neurologist. Determining the pattern of clinical involvement and the nerve modalities affected can help to generate a differential diagnosis and design an approach to determine a potential cause. The combination of clinical features, electrodiagnostic testing, and ancillary laboratory studies may be used to determine the etiology. As the most common acquired etiology of peripheral neuropathy is diabetes, careful testing for impaired glucose metabolism is an important part of any diagnostic evaluation.