Diabetes Old and New

Describing how diabetes may develop is not the same thing as explaining why it happens. Just as a diabetic condition may be the result of any one of several things, it is believed that diabetes has not one single cause, but, rather, may causes. Some of these are still unknown, but researchers have already discovered a number of clues and some of the newest findings have tuned many old ideas about the condition upside down.

If you read a book about diabetes that was written before about 1976 or so, you may find a statement like, Diabetes is not contagious. You can’t catch diabetes. That is still true in one respect: you don’t need to fear that you will come down with diabetes if you work or play with a diabetic, or if you live with a diabetic patent, child, or spouse. Yet a number of recent studies have suggested that at least one type of diabetes is in fact infectious. However, you can’t catch it in quite the same way you would catch a cold or flu or tuberculosis-it’s much more complicated than that.

Medical workers have noticed that diabetes in children, normally a rather rare disease through it is growing ever more common, tends to occur in clusters. The number of cases will suddenly crop up in a particular locality. Careful studies of health records have shown that outbreaks of juvenile diabetes often follow an epidemic of a virus disease, such as mumps or rubella. The group of viruses called Coxsackie viruses have also been implicated. In some cases, the diabetes epidemic follows the virus epidemic closely in others, there seems to be a period of about three or four years between the out break of the virus disease and the appearance of symptoms of diabetes.