Here's some news that might make you rethink the way we approach pediatric diabetes care. The University of Cincinnati's very own Robert Cohen, MD, dropped some science on us in a recent chat with MedCentral, referencing a couple of studies from the American Diabetes Association’s 85th Scientific Sessions. And guess what? If we can manage to delay the onset of type 1 diabetes in the young ’uns, we might be looking at a future with less heart and kidney trouble on their plates.
Over at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, some pretty sharp minds have been piecing together the puzzle of type 1 diabetes diagnosis age and its ugly friends: heart conditions and early death rates. They've been elbow-deep in data from the Swedish National Diabetes Register, and what they've found isn't anything to breeze over. Turns out, if a kid gets slapped with a type 1 diabetes diagnosis before hitting their tenth birthday, they're staring down the barrel of a 5.7 times greater risk of checking out early due to heart issues, in stark contrast to their non-diabetic buddies. If that's not enough to give you pause, these little ones are estimated to lose about 16.3 years off their lifespan. But, there's a sliver of hope—diagnose diabetes later, and each extra year could knock down the cardiovascular mortality risk by 2.6%.
When you hear the words of Cohen—a full professor in UC's Department of Internal Medicine and a UC Health physician—it drills home the significance. According to a statement obtained by UC News, Cohen remarked, “The association between early-onset type 1 diabetes and more severe complications is not new,” adding that this kind of talk has been on clinicians' lips for the last three to four decades. However, this new study has confirmed these not-so-cheery anecdotes with some hard data, and that's why it matters. It lays out the cold, complex numbers on how grave the stakes are if we don't catch diabetes later in the game. Seriously, hats off to the researchers for quantifying the risk with a massive, up-to-date dataset. Cohen plainly stated, “this study confirms – using robust methods – that age at diagnosis is a critical modifier of long-term cardiovascular and renal risk.”
