Question/ observation

I was reading fiction and i swear i want to smack the author. anyway i was reading it and out comes this part about how the main character finds out she has T1 because she starved herself. ok I may be wrong on this but WHAT?! are you kidding me? Yeah i’ve heard of rare birth defects causing it, but starvation? is that even possible?

It does sounds terribly misinformed.

I hate that! If I find something out that is just plain incorrect, I kind of lose interest in the book. I much prefer an author that did some research over one that did not.

I am not an expert, but I have never heard that. Starvation? I would think we would have a much higher percentage of T1’s in third world countries if that was the case (and some parts of the US also).

Im not an expert too but I think the information is incorrect and absurd. Only proves that still up to this “high-tech” time…education is very important.

Melissa - I think the author may have gotten mixed up about how to use the word “starvation”. People become diabetic because their pancreas isn’t making enough juice (insulin), or their the cells in the muscles, etc. aren’t able to use the insulin properly or both combined. So, then the starvation bit comes into play - which is maybe what the author of your book got confused with. Because when the glucose in your blood starts to rise - then the cells are starved of energy.

I had the same thought: the author mixed things up. People are losing weight when their insulin production breaks down. So T1 leads to a phase of starvation - not the other way around.

Starvation even though you are eating as much or more than normal.

I developed symptoms after a week of hard physical activity then going directly to no activity. I am not an expert but do we know what causes the body fighting itself? My doc at the time said and I still think he may be right, that the quick change in activity may have prompted the immune system malfunction that leaves me T1. Now of course this was 30 years ago and our diabetic knowledge has come a long way but do we really know the triggers?

At the end of the week of heavy activity I weighed the same as before it started. No increased thirst or hunger. Within 3 days I was down 30 pounds and admitted into the hospital with a sky high sugar.

The work of Dr. Denise Faustman shows that a special sort of T-cell will attack the insulin producing cells. How this behaviour is triggered or learned by the rogue T-cell is not known today. In my opinion it makes no sense at all to think about the trigger because there was not the slightest chance to prevent it. Without your activity phase it would have come one infection later. The rogue T-cells were already there on the hunt for suspicious looking cells - and finally they have found what they were looking for. In mice Dr. Faustman could kill only the rogue T-cells and this successfully prevented T1. But it will need much more research to apply this knowledge to human beings.

Maybe she was on a starvation diet, and the stress that the diet put on her body triggered the diabetes? When I did that, I was diagnosed about a year later.

Although an understanding of the genetics, methodology and the indicators of having the rogue T-cells will be required before you can treat the public. Learning how to kill the rogue T-cells is the frist step. You also have to know when and where to look for them. Unless, of course, you can reverse the effects of the rogue T-cells. Then of course you can wait until diagnosis.

since i was dx’d which was about 20 years ago i have heard several reasons to get diabetes, but this was a first time hearing this. it was a fiction from a site i go to, I commented to the writer saying umm that’s not correct.