GFAP and diabetes mellitus: The present study found that diabetes could induce spinal cord astrocytosis, as manifested by increased expression of GFAP, similar to the finding of Dauch et al. (2012), Benitez et al. (2015), Deng et al. (2017), and Kiguchi et al. (2017), however, Wodarski et al. (2009) and Shayea et al. (2020) found that STZ rats had a reduced number of astrocytes.