Young diabetes patients face drug and alcohol risk

Friday September 9th, 2011

Deaths related to drug use and alcohol consumption may have become increasingly prevalent in the last few decades among people who develop diabetes in childhood, researchers warned today.

While survival of patients with early onset type 1 diabetes, which is diagnosed up to the age of 14, has improved since the 1980s, survival of patients diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 29 has deteriorated over the same period of time.

Finnish researchers investigated short and long-term time trends in death rates are reported in the British Medical Journal.

They studied 17,306 patients who were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes between 1970 and 1999. All participants were under the age of 30 and they were followed up for an average of 21 years.

There were 1,338 deaths altogether during the time of the study and the study discovered that mortality due to alcohol and drug related causes accounted for 39 per cent of deaths in the late onset group in the first 20 years of diagnosis.

The researchers, led by Valma Harjutsalo, of Folkhälsan Research Centre, Helsinki, Finland, write: "This highlights the importance of permanent and long lasting doctor-patient relationships, close supervision, and guidance on the short term and long term effects of alcohol in young people with type 1 diabetes, especially in our alcohol permissive cultures."

British Medical Journal September 9 2011

Tags: Diabetes | Drug and Alcohol Abuse | Europe

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