

#Type 1 vs type 2 diabetes how to
Researchers are learning how to predict a person's odds of getting diabetes. If you have this syndrome, your child's risk of getting the syndrome and developing type 1 diabetes, is one in two. In addition to having diabetes, these people also have thyroid disease and a poorly working adrenal gland-some also have other immune system disorders. There is an exception to these numbers: about one in every seven people with type 1 diabetes has a condition called type 2 polyglandular autoimmune syndrome. If both you and your partner have type 1 diabetes, the risk is between 1 in 10 and 1 in 4. Your child's risk is doubled if you developed diabetes before age 11. If you are a woman with type 1 diabetes and your child was born before you were 25, your child's risk is 1 in 25 if your child was born after you turned 25, your child's risk is 1 in 100. If you are a man with type 1 diabetes, the odds of your child developing diabetes are 1 in 17. In experiments that follow relatives of people with type 1 diabetes, researchers have found that most of those who later got diabetes had certain autoantibodies, or proteins that destroy bacteria or viruses (antibodies "gone bad" that attack the body's own tissues), in their blood for years before they are diagnosed. In many people, the development of type 1 diabetes seems to take many years. For example, type 1 diabetes is less common in people who were breastfed and in those who first ate solid foods at later ages. It’s possible that a virus that has only mild effects on most people triggers type 1 diabetes in others. Type 1 diabetes develops more often in winter than summer and is more common in places with cold climates. One trigger might be related to cold weather.

We think these factors must be more common in white people because white people have the highest rate of type 1 diabetes.īecause most people who are at risk do not get diabetes, researchers want to find out what the environmental triggers are. In most cases of type 1 diabetes, people need to inherit risk factors from both parents. When one twin has type 2 diabetes, the other's risk is three in four at most. Yet when one twin has type 1 diabetes, the other gets the disease, at most, only half the time. That’s right: genes alone are not enough. You inherit a predisposition to the disease, then something in your environment triggers it. Type 1 and type 2 diabetes have different causes, but there are two factors that are important in both. You’re not the only one asking these questions-and we are here to help.

You may worry that your children will develop it, too. You've probably wondered how you developed diabetes. If you’re living with diabetes, you probably have a lot of questions.
