I was diagnosed type 1 in february 2005. My children, two sons, were 10 and 8 years old at that time.
Nor my parents or grandparents had diabetes.
Do my children have a bigger chance to get D, since I developped it ?
Is there something I can do ?
Any information about the subject is welcome.
Thanks
Nicolas.
good link, Dave.
The short answer is no. Many type 1s are the only ones diagnosed in their families. Check out this discussion about being the only one - over 230 members responded.
The long answer is maybe and that they don’t really know enough about the hereditary nature of type 1. We also have some type 1 members here who have multiple instances in their family - their parents, their children, their cousins, siblings, etc.
Hi Nicholas,
I have had the same worry over the years since my husband got diagnosed with LADA. We decided to have Santiago (my son, he is 5) participate on the Trial Net clinica study, that is a “Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet is an international network of researchers who are exploring ways to prevent, delay and reverse the progression of type 1 diabetes.”… the great thing is that they will screen for free your child once a year to look for diabetes-related autoantibodies that may appear years before type 1 diabetes develops.
I highly recommend that you look into this, it helps to know if there is something going on, since antibodies usually show way before symptoms. It helps with research plus it give peace of mind… also there have been some advances on there is some hope for cure if antibodies discovered on time.
Nicolas,
When I received my accurate diagnosis of LADA, I was relieved for my kids. Children of people with Type 2 are much more likely to develop diabetes than children of people like me with Type 1 (diagnosed after age 40 with no one else in the whole extended family with any kind of diabetes).
In either case, the odds are in favor of your children not developing diabetes.
Janet
Is there something I can do? I don’t know of any research that indicates there is something we can do to prevent getting Type 1 diabetes.
Unfortunately, Khurt, there is no prevention for T1.
I can give advice about what I experienced though…
I was diagnosed with pancreatitis about 6 weeks before my T1 DX. I was given a strict diet to follow. I was 22 and so I followed the diet for about a week, and then gave up. I also remember the doctor asking me if I ever was a binge drinker and I said no, I had no idea that binge drinking was consuming four or more alcoholic drinks within a short time period. Well doesn’t everyone at times in their life? 6 weeks later I was rushed to the hospital with DKA, BS was so high they gave me morphine for the pain.
Sometimes I wonder if I had just followed the diet, avoided alcohol, and gave my body time to heal if I would be living with diabetes today.
It’s just the role we have been given in this life! Just like any other chronic condition you have to control it, it can’t control you.
tracy
Tracy, my fault for not being clear. I was restating and responding to Nicolas’s question.
Everybody, thanks for the help !!!
… I didn’t have time yet to do all the reading, but I surely will.
And may be draw some conclusions…
The odds, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), don’t look very good. According to a 2003 study by the CDC, it was estimated that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop some form of diabetes in his or her lifetime. However, to some extent, the CDC’s record of forecasting is public relations, and the methodology used has been disputed and debated among medical professionals. What the CDC stats do not indicate is what form of diabetes children are likely to be diagnosed with. According to Joslin, if an immediate relative (parent, brother, sister, son or daughter) has type 1 diabetes, one’s risk of developing type 1 diabetes is 10 to 20 times the risk of the general population; your risk can go from 1 in 100 to roughly 1 in 10 or possibly higher, depending on which family member has the diabetes and when they developed it. The risk for being diagnosed with type 1 are higher if a) one of the parents developed type 1 diabetes before the age 11. The risk for a child of a parent with type 1 diabetes is lower if it is the mother — rather than the father — who has diabetes. “If the father has it, the risk is about 1 in 10 (10 percent) that his child will develop type 1 diabetes — the same as the risk to a sibling of an affected child” according to Dr. Warram, a Lecturer in Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. Of course, the most noteworthy statistic is that although a majority of caucasians have higher odds than any other ethnic group, the majority of people will NOT develop type 1. Type 2 odds, however, are a different matter, and it’s less likely to occur until your children are adults.
Is there something you can do? Well, there’s nothing you can do at present to prevent type 1 from occurring, although there are several clinical trials now underway, notably from a Swedish company Diamyd which has a vaccine now undergoing Phase III human clinical trials (see http://www.diamyd.com/docs/clinicalTrials.aspx?section=trials for details) which if all goes well, could become available in the not-too-distant future.
National stats project less than 30% chance for the offspring to inherit Tpye 1 diabetes .But the numbers suggest chance and not hereditary. As for LADA there is no chance of hereditary factor. In fact LADA is rare .
Myself I’m LADA and as far back as any one knows I’m the only member in the family to have type1 .Hope it stays that way.It’s not something Iwant to share.
The CDC figures 1 out of 3 is for type 2 based on the projection of obesity. Something that has never been heard of before is childhood type2 diabetes caused by the increase of of childhood obesity and lack of activity.
There is some conection to low Vitamin D3 and developing both types of diabetes .So maybe the best chance for prvention is to get plenty of sunshine.
Thanks for your input Scott.
It’s not so positive, but these are the facts, he…
As a Belgian guy, and english being not my native language, I have sometimes problems with the terminology: what is LADA ? (see inputs below)
“If the father has it, the risk is about 1 in 10 (10 percent) that his child will develop type 1 diabetes”… as I developed D at the age of 42, will this “higher” age reduce the risk in an important matter ?? Or is age not so relevant, but more the fact that my body developed D, and I passed this higher risk through my genes…
My mother was a Type 1 diabetic for 38 years. I am a type 2. I think if the gene wasen’t in my family I probably wouldn’t be diabetic. Also I did this to myself. If I had known earlier in life what I’ve learned about diabetes in the last year I probably would have taken better care of myself.
I don’t see how it could be “rare” for it to be in families. I’m third generation, my grandmother had type 1, my mother had type 1, and my uncle- her brother- also had type 1 and I have type 1. I was adopted so I’m not sure about my father’s side, but it’s pretty common in my birth mother’s side with the exception of my sister. She doesn’t have any problems at all. Now granted she is two years younger, 26, and I didn’t get diagnosed until I was almost 28, same with my grandmother.
LADA is not rare at all. According to Jerry Palmer, a leading diabetes researcher, LADA is two to three times more common than childhood-onset Type 1 diabetes (from “Type 1 Diabetes in Adults: Principles and Practice” 2008). And of course there is a hereditary factor with LADA, because LADA is Type 1 diabetes and there is a genetic component.
The odds are slightly lower if the father has type 1 and develops it after age 11, but I do not know all the details, nor do I have all of the odds for each unique situation … it is best to refer to Joslin’s web site for more detail.
My brother was dx Type 1 when he was 12 years old as far as we know he was the 1st in the family, that has since changed. Our son was dx Type 1 at the age of 1 he is now 30, our daughter became Type 1 10 years ago at the age of 17, and I was dx Type 1, 6 years ago. My husband is now being tested for Type 2 diabetes.There is only the 4 of us. Of all the other members of my family I am the youngest of 5 siblings who between them have 17 children. My kids are the only ones who have diabetes.
LADA stands for Latent Auto-immune Diabetes in Adults. It’s a somewhat different form of Type 1, mostly different in speed of onset. Type 1s like me (that got it at age 5) get it very fast, I only had symptoms for a few days. The older you are when developing LADA the longer it tends to take developing. Sometimes people are misdiagnosed as Type 2 based on their age, but as time goes by the pills don’t work any longer and only insulin will do. Somewhere in there they find that they were actually LADA.
Of course it’s also possible, though rare, that an older person gets Type 1 regardless of age. That’s why it’s Type 1 or 2 now, no longer thought of (wrongly) as Juvenile or Adult Onset Diabetes.
Thanks for the explanation… for me it was directly type 1 at the age of 41… I didn’t know about this LADA until I joined TU…
In fact the symptons are the same as if you get first type 2 and then, after a while, would get type 1… not surprised it is misdiagnosed sometimes. But I think they could see the difference between LADA and type 2 by the antiboddies in your blood… or am i wrong ?
Anyway… it’s another discussion…
Olha…eu não sou médica mas descobri a DM1 aos 15. Minha avó materna morreu com diabetes. Meus pais não têm. Tenho dois filhos: 4 anos e 11 anos. Eles não tem…até agora. É genético…só Deus para dizer se um dia terão. Faço exames neles regularmente e na última hemoglobina glicosilada deu empate em 5,3. Torço para que não e tento mantê-los sem sobrecarga de açúcar. É o que podemos fazer Nicolas. Beijos brasileiros.