How does adult onset Type I diabetes work? Is it “burnout” of the body’s ability to make insulin? Why isn’t it noticed sooner? Does good lifestyle prevent symptom development?
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My completely laymen, nothing but speculation, seriously I’m not a doctor or a scientist, theory of my diagnosis in my 30s was the Atkins diet. Was going to get married and she suggested that we do the diet. She actually read the book and we were taking all the supplements and doing the other stuff, not just avoiding carbs.
After we got married, we both dropped the diet and pigged out at Disney World. Shortly after that, we moved to Australia and I kept losing weight. Starting having symptoms that I didn’t recognize till after the fact and eventually I passed out at work. I got to experience how much better socialized medicine is. I think that being on the Atkins diet was my trigger.
The total cause is unknown, there are strong links between gluten and dairy ingestion being a factor to the point where type 1 diagnosis is supposed to be followed up with a test for celiac disease (rates of celiac disease are much higher for type 1s than average.) It is not something people are just born with but something triggers the immune system to attack itself and with certain genes and whatever environmental combination causes the body to attack it’s pancreas.
You can’t notice it sooner because you don’t have it until it happens. You can’t fully prevent it because the true full cause is unknown. There are steps parents can take to reduce the risk of future autoimmune diseases for newborns to 2 years based on some theories (avoid cesarean section if possible, keep antibiotics to a minimum, minimize viral infection, breastfeed if possible)
Certain viral infections like some enteroviruses have associations. But it’s really hard to measure the total cause of a disease that you cannot induce nor can you ethically induce even if you could.
Ex wife has it. If you’re willing to take your diet and exercise seriousness to a high enough level and you have the privilege of CGMs and pumps then management can be achieved pretty reasonably. If you suffer from serious food cravings and don’t take it seriously it can be very bad. But hope objectively exists especially if we can get the cost of insulin in USA down.
The leading theory is a viral infection that is immunologically similar to beta cells. Hit me at 33… I’m a biologist and I think it’s also possible the immune system may have been clearing mutated/cancerous/pre-cancerous beta cells. No one has looked into that idea as far as I know
Heyup, I was diagnosed at 19. I can’t pinpoint the exact time it started for me, but I was a bigger guy and just one day the weight just melted off. It was to the point where if I handed over my ID for a club, they thought it wasn’t me. I was chugging several litres of water daily, and lost well over half my body weight within a few months.
There is nothing you can do for type 1. One day it’ll just happen, no matter how healthy, fat, for or lazy you are, it will happen if you’re born with it.
My husband was 40. Not over weight. No family history. Probably brought on by a virus. It is an autoimmune response that attacks the pancreas. If you can Google it, I’m sure you can find more details about the specific functions of the pancreas. You cannot prevent type1.
I just want to add- people say a lot of things are triggers for autoimmune diseases with zero proof of this. So take all the anecdotal stories with a grain of salt.
I’m an RN so I’ll answer from more the medical perspective.
Your pancreas does many things. One thing it does is make insulin from these little islands of cells scattered around the pancreas. In fact the word insulin means island. Type I diabetes is not caused by bad lifestyle and can happen anytime in your life. It is more common to hit you when you are young. This is why sometimes people call Type II diabetes “adult onset” even though you can actually get Type I as an adult, but it’s less common.
Type I is not a burnout at all, which makes sense given that it strikes children who haven’t had a chance to burn anything out. With Type I, your own immune system attacks and kills the little islands that make insulin. We don’t know why and so far we have not been able to stop it even when we know it’s happening. The reason it isn’t noticed sooner is that it happens quickly and the damage is mostly done by the time symptoms happen.
I can talk a bit to your last question about lifestyle and T1D. There is some research that indicates that if you do exercise on a regular basis your will push your debut date ahead and that can indeed explain why some people get the diagnose later in life than other. I was diagnosed with T1D at age 33 and have been more or less physical active on a regular basis most of my adult life.
My wife was also post infection. 40 I think when it happened. Went in for an abscess and had surgery. Called me after she was back in her hospital room, when I was taking care of a couple things at the house in tears that she was adult onset T1.
My whole family has autoimmunes – runs in both mother and father sides of my family, so there is a chance I’m at higher risk than someone with no family history. Within immediate family we have Pernicious Anemia (stomach/intestinal), Crohn’s Disease (intestinal), severe Berger’s Disease (kidney), severe Adult Onset Still’s Disease (joints/mobility), Lupus (systemic), Multiple Sclerosis (nervous system). Similar dispersion in extended family as well.
I currently am the only one within my immediate and extended family who has gotten to my age without any autoimmune (so far).
After my older sister got her autoimmune I started reading about various ones in our family and many studies theorize that a severe infection triggers autoimmunes. This was all pre-pandemic so I was the person who already had masks and stuff when it started because I was someone who wore a mask if someone around me was sick (or people went in to work sick, which was far too common back in the day).
When the pandemic hit I had a friend get severe Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (systemic autoimmune) after a COVID infection. This was all pre vaccine and there were articles at the time about MCAS and T1 Diabetes instances increasing after severe COVID infections. Correlation is not causation, but is interesting to note.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/09/research-explores-possible-link-between-type-1-diabetes-covid-19
https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-022-01891-2
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34944099/
Regardless of COVID, I believe there is enough evidence that -any- severe infection probably triggers, and early in the pandemic the COVID infections were severe, so if you’re at risk for any autoimmune, common or not, avoid infections.
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