Diabetes care warning
Wednesday January 7th, 2015
People with type 1 diabetes continue to face a struggle to achieve their full span of life, British researchers warned last night.
People diagnosed before the age of 20 face losing more than a decade of life compared with other people, researchers found.
The study was carried out by Shona Livingstone at Dundee University, UK, and colleagues.
They explain that the management of type 1 diabetes has advanced in the last 30 years, but the condition still has serious consequences.
They set out to measure up-to-date estimates of life expectancy, using a large national registry of type 1 diabetes patients in Scotland. This covered 24,691 patients aged over 20 years.
This showed that life expectancy at an age 20 is an additional 46.2 years for men with type 1 diabetes versus 57.3 years for other men - a loss of over 11 years. For women, life expectancy at 20 is 48.l years for patients versus 61.0 years - a loss of nearly 13 years.
In other words, just 47% of men and 55% of women with type 1 diabetes reach the age of 70 years, compared with 76% of men and 83% of women without. Full details appeared in yesterday's Journal of the American Medical Association.
A separate study on type 2 diabetes has highlighted the way that genes and environment work together to trigger the disease.
Dr Andrew Feinberg of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Maryland, USA, and his team analysed genes and epigenetic changes in lean and obese mice and humans. This revealed that obesity-induced epigenetic changes "are surprisingly similar in mice and humans", and highlighted new possibilities for prevention and treatment of the disease.
The team, which includes experts from the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, and Oxford University, UK, add that some of the changes associated with obesity affect genes known to raise diabetes risk.
The study was published yesterday in the journal Cell Metabolism.
Livingstone, S. J. et al. Estimated Life Expectancy in a Scottish Cohort With Type 1 Diabetes, 2008-2010. JAMA 6 January 2015 doi:10.1001/jama.2014.16425 Feinberg, A. et al. Cell Metabolism 6 January 2015 (in press)
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