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.

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.

Diabetes in Youth

Diabetes in Youth:

Usually all a person with latent diabetes needs to do is eat a sensible diet, get plenty of exercise, and have regular checkups to make sure the condition has no progressed. These are good health rules for anyone.

In some cases, a diabetic condition may be quite serious by the time it is correctly diagnosed. Juvenile diabetes, which strikes mainly children, teenagers, and youn adults, may develop quite suddenly. The person may feel fine, and then, with hardly any warning, he or she falls so seriously ill that emergency hospitilization may be necessary.

Juvenile diabetics account for only about 20 percent of the total diabetic population. The far more common forms of maturity-onset diabetes usually strike people after the age of thirty-five or forty- and then strike mainly people who are overweight. The probability of getting diabetes roughly doubles with each decade of life, and with each 20 percent of excess weight.

Maturity-onset diabetes usually develops gradually with plenty of warning signals. But a person may overlook some of the symptoms of think they are due to something else. Reaching for that extra bottle of Coke, one might think. It certainly is hot today! A person with a sudden need to urinate more than usual might pass it off with the thought, It must have have been that soup I had for dinner, or I shouldn’t hve had that extra glass of milk before bedtime. Even in children, the early signs and symptoms of diabetes may be misleading. If a child suddenly begins wetting the bed, his or her parents are more likely to wonder about emotional problems or spank the child for disobedience than to suspect diabetes. But taken together, the symptoms of diabetes spell out a very clear warning message. Since each of us has about one chance in five of developing diabetes at some time in life, it is a message we should all learn to read.