Median age of Type 1 onset in 2021 ...

Status
Not open for further replies.
H

helli

Well-Known Member
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 1
According to this worldwide study, I think we can knock the myth that Type 1 only occurs in children on the head.

The median age of onset last year was ... drum roll .... it contains a 3 .... dramatic pause to build the tension ... repeat everything we have already said to delay the reveal ... the median age of onset of Type 1 diabetes, worldwide, in 2021 contains a 3 ... and a 9 ... it was thirty nine.

The article also suggests a significant growth of people with Type 1 around the world but does not offer any hypothesis to explain it.
 
Fascinating - thanks for posting @helli It does make you wonder why there’s been an increase in Type 1 too. I remember seeing reports a few years ago that the incidence in children had greatly increased (doubled, tripled?) over the last 15 years at that time.

Type 1 is definitely not something only children get. I still ponder what the process is - ie does someone receive the trigger at, say, 16yrs, but then the auto-immune attack progresses slowly in them so they get diagnosed at 32 whereas another person could be exposed to the trigger at 16 and get Type 1 at 18?

And what is this damn mysterious trigger??
 
My thoughts are that the autoimmune predisposition is genetic and then the trigger happens later in life and can be quite random.
I also think that there are a lot of older insulin dependent diabetics who were diagnosed Type 2 and never got tested for Type 1 and I think they may be why the medical profession believe that progression of Type 2 is inevitable, when in fact many of those people may well be/have been slow onset Type 1. The increased availability of GAD antibody testing may well be enabling more Type 1s to be identified. I do even wonder if all slimmer Type 2s may in fact be slow onset Type 1s.

I think for me, menopause may well have been a triggering factor and my high carb diet was putting my beta cells under pressure and making them more vulnerable to attack and that created the environment for my immune system to misbehave. My mother had an autoimmune condition which exhibited at menopause and my sister has developed one at the same sort of age. as did my diabetes, so that makes me think genetic and menopause for the trigger in our case, but I may be a million miles off course with my thinking.
 
Bruce Stephens said:
When diagnosed in adults part of the increase has got to be just better diagnosis of people who'd previously have been treated as insulin dependent Type 2.
Click to expand...
The study does mention "about 35 000 non-diagnosed individuals died within 12 months of symptomatic onset."
I wonder how many of them had type 2.
 
I know through the first phase of the pandemic, my massage therapist had a client who was a Paediatrician, who told her there had been an increase of children with Diabetes.
 
helli said:
That's definitely not the case for all ... unless my genes have a predisposition which has stayed hidden for the last 3 generations.
Click to expand...
And yet my brother and I are both Type 1, but we've been unable to discover any incidence in the family for more than 3 generations....
 
JJay said:
And yet my brother and I are both Type 1, but we've been unable to discover any incidence in the family for more than 3 generations....
Click to expand...
Are there other autoimmune conditions in your family though? I am not sure that it is specifically diabetes which is genetic but perhaps a predisposition to autoimmune issues. My mother got hit with rheumatoid arthritis and my sister has developed polymyalgia and I have Type 1.... all autoimmune and all developed at menopause. I don't know enough of my family's medical history prior to that to know if there was a longer line of autoimmune issues and likely in those days some of them were not diagnosed anyway.
 
rebrascora said:
Are there other autoimmune conditions in your family though? I am not sure that it is specifically diabetes which is genetic but perhaps a predisposition to autoimmune issues. My mother got hit with rheumatoid arthritis and my sister has developed polymyalgia and I have Type 1.... all autoimmune and all developed at menopause. I don't know enough of my family's medical history prior to that to know if there was a longer line of autoimmune issues and likely in those days some of them were not diagnosed anyway.
Click to expand...
Not that I'm aware of, though of course my evidence is limited to hearsay from parents' and grandparents' generations, plus information on death certificates obtained in the course of family tree research.

I'm convinced that my own predisposition (if there is one!) was triggered by a bad bout of 'flu, 10 years pre-menopause. However, my brother's diagnosis came completely out of the blue. Neither of us have children of our own, so it's all pretty academic, but intriguing nevertheless!
 
I suspect the average age is even higher as many like me are not correctly diagnosed for years from their 'T2' diagnosis. In fact I'm still officially T2 as my C-peptide test was just above the T1 level and despite being treated by an excellent consultant who treats me as T1 with prescription Libre etc. I believe the real culprits are viruses for many late onset T1 cases. I had a high white cell count followed by diabetes diagnosis within 12 months. I have a friend who had a liver virus causing her diabetes. So, we need to think not just autoimmune which may be true for childhood T1 but not later in life. My wife having had a kidney transplant last year has made me find out just how many viruses we encounter during life. How many have heard of EBV (Epstein Barr aka Herpes Simplex 4) which has run riot thru my wife having come in with the kidney. She is regularly tested for other viruses such CMV and so on. The medical profession has been slow to catch-up on the influence of viruses.
 
DaveB said:
I believe the real culprits are viruses for many late onset T1 cases.
Click to expand...

As I understand it, it is known that viruses can be the trigger, but it is still the immune system's response to them which causes Type 1 diabetes (ie autoimmune), by getting a bit twitchy as a result of the virus and attacking parts of the body it shouldn't. I believe this can be the trigger in children and adults and is most likely why we will see/are seeing a significant increase in Type 1 diabetics as a result of Covid.
 
The last few generations of humanity have been blessed with an extraordinary gift: Modern Western Science and medicine.
Throughout history 50% of people died before the age of 15. (25% before age 1, and the other 25% before age 15)
Those figures can hide generations of inherited genetic defects, all hidden amongst the background of high mortality rates.
Modern medicine allows more than 95% of people in the world to live to adulthood. This percentage is even higher in the West.
Autoimmune conditions are one of the side effects of this 'giant leap' in medicine.
ourworldindata.org

Mortality in the past: every second child died

The chances that a newborn survives childhood have increased from 50% to 96% globally. This article asks how we know about the mortality of children in the past and what we can learn from it for our future.
ourworldindata.org ourworldindata.org
 
Last edited:
I read after dx that there’s a group of viruses that are linked to the development of autoimmunity - one of them is the virus that causes the mumps (I had mumps in 1996, aged 29) and the virus that causes gastroenteritis (which I had in 2007, six months before my diabetes symptoms started). A sort of slow-burn chain reaction is how I understand what happened to me. Stupid body! 🙂
 
A really interesting article. I knew that there were more adults diagnosed with T1 now, and as @DaveB has said there are others who are misdiagnosed as T2 To add in.

Since the destruction of beta cells takes a bit of time, and is often slower in adults, we would need to track back quite a while to identify the trigger for each of us. I wonder whether the T1 dx is often linked to a specific virus/event, but that may just be the moment when our insulin requirements went into overload, and the final few beta cells just went on strike (before then popping up to make things confusing in The Honeymoon Period).
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top