Diabetes Can Change Your Voice

Diabetes is a problem. For those who have type 2 diabetes, it’s a major problem for your health, particularly your cardiovascular system. This article reveals that it’s also going to change your voice. But only if you’re female.

These excellent researchers (see below) looked at the effects of being diabetic will have on your voice. Highlighting a sharp increase in Diabetes diagnosis in Thailand and reporting it is the cause of death in 6% of the Thai population. The researchers compared a group of people in their 50’s with a diabetes diagnosis with another group of people with no diabetes. The results were clear, there were significant changes in peoples fundamental frequencies, the frequency of their speaking voice. But it only showed up in women. There were no changes in male voices.

Why? And why only women? Other studies report that people with diabetes have ‘reduced muscular strength’ as your speaking voice frequency relies on the strength of muscles, its mass, tension and length, it will therefore change your voice. There are no indicators why it only changes women’s voices and not men’s. We also know that as we get older your pitch will naturally decrease for women and increase for men, but it’s unclear from this study why diabetes has a direct effect on your voice.

It’s a great study. One that can be built on in the future, providing more answers to why and how.

What do you think? Has this happened to you? What will this mean for your singing voice? Comment and let me know what you’d like to see next on MoV.

Instrumental Acoustic Voice Characteristics in Adults with Type 2 Diabetes. Sittichai Pinyopodjanard, Pichatorn Suppakitjanusant, Prangorn Lomprew, Nittaya Kasemkosin, Laor Chailurkit, and Boonsong Ongphiphadhanakul, Thailand. Journal of Voice 2020