Is Juvenile Diabetes Hereditary

There is the question whether Juvenile diabetes is passed down or not. Recent studies have shown that most juvenile diabetics have several specific types of chemicals on the surface of their cells that are not usually found in other people. These cell-surface chemicals, which are hereditary, might be the key to the increased vulnerability of the pancreas. They might be the chemicals against which a person’s body makes antibodies when viruses attack. Sometimes they might serve as chemical hooks by which invading viruses can attach themselves to the beta cells. Interestingly, maturity-onset diabetics do not show the same sort of correlation with special cell-suface chemicals that juvenile diabetics do.

Before the role of viruses in juvenile diabetes was suspected, it was thought that this was a hereditary disease that two had genes, one carried by each parent, could combine in the child to produce the disease, Thus two seemingly normal, nondiabetic parents could have diabetic children. If one of the parents was a diabetic, the chances of a child’s inheriting the disease would be even greater. But genetic studies have indicated that things don’t work that way after all. Studies of identical twins share exactly the same heredity. So if juvenile diabetes is inherited, you would expect that if one twin has juvenile diabetes, the other will have it too. Researchers were surprised to find that this was not the case. Joslin Foundation in Boston surveyed groups of juvenile diabetics who had identical twins and found that only about half the other twins also had the disease. Even to persent, of course, is much higher than the probability of two unrelated persons having diabetes.