5 Reasons That May Explain Why Type 1 Diabetes Is on the Rise

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Medical science is still in its infancy - we don't know what factors lead to the onset of most "acquired" diseases. Out of the tens of thousands of diseases known, we don't even know which are acquired through external factors (such as behavior, environment, nutrition (or lack of it), stress/distress (both physical & mental), etc) or those present at birth through internal factors (e.g. genetics/mutations, or the prenatal/in-utero environment).
Most diseases occur from a complex set of causes. When we say someone "gets" a disease - meaning its onset, expression, progression, and all stages up to its hopeful treatment/remission - we should know external AND internal causes work together to cause/express it.
For example, the pre-disposition factor (e.g., where someone's body is "more likely" to get a disease due to genetics) itself has many external & internal causes. If someone is pre-disposed, they already have "weaknesses" in their genes. However, that might be insufficient to cause the disease - they might have to exercise some behaviors (e.g. smoking or eating fatty foods) to make the genetic weakness actually cause the disease. Maybe they live in a place that has genetically-modified foods or growth hormones/steroids are added to foods - this COULD (we don't really know) have an indirect impact on them. Maybe they were raised in an "ultra clean" environment that prevented the full development of bacterial flora (the germs that normally grow in and on our body, supporting it) - thus causing some of the "good" bacteria to die off. The cause would be the lack of specific bacteria, and not an "ultra clean" home.
Similarly, the other factors described earlier (stress, behavior, environment, etc.) all work together in very complex ways to cause diseases.
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Another reason why science is slow to find answers is that most scientists confuse the concepts of "true cause" and "correlation".
If 990 out of 1000 left-handed people get gum disease, is being a "lefty" a cause? Maybe 950 of those people had mumps and an ear-piercing as a kid. Would you say mumps caused it? Did ear-piercings cause it? Or both? You can't say either caused it - this won't prove causality. The cause might be that toothbrushes are designed for righties - so lefties can't brush their teeth well.
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Also, several people said something like "XXX (e.g. milk) can't be a cause, because my baby/I never used/had/ate/did that as a child yet I still got the disease - and so XXX/milk cannot be a cause."
NO - a single example doesn't disprove the entire theory. Maybe your body is special (you had other protective factors/behaviors to counteract the effects of XXX)? Or maybe your body WAS weakened by XXX but you haven't seen its full effects yet?
Likewise, if a thousand people get a disease after they used/had/ate/did XXX (e.g. lots of milk), this doesn't prove XXX is a cause. This only shows correlation. Science requires causation, not correlation (see my point above).

Anil of NJ 2:26PM October 13, 2010

My father has Dtype1 and my mother has Dtype 2, I hope will never have see my body have diabetic, I hope the scientits find out treatment for diabetic patients.

Ashraf of OH 12:08AM September 26, 2010

Are all of you following Denise Faustman, M.D. and her Diabetes Research at Mass General? Google her and read about it-----you will be amazed; her funding is from folks like us----seems that some interest groups does not wish a cure for Type 1 Diabetes?

Diana of OR 3:22PM September 22, 2010

My daughter developed type 1 diabetes at age 2 1/2. She was put on formula using cows milk at age 3 months, as she could NOT tolerate other infant formulas. I fully believe cows milk has some bearing-----new Mom's, please nurse your babies-----in the mid-60's it was not an acceptable thing to do!!!!

Diana Smith of OR 2:54PM September 22, 2010

Well this is eye opening. My kids are thin to average weight but we don't eat a lot of sweets or junk food as adults so my kid's don't either. My wife prepares fresh food almost every day including fresh vegetables. She forces them to eat them too. They exercise, get a decent amount of sun and sleep. They were both breast feed until they where 3 years old and are never sick. I can count on one hand the number of colds and fevers they have had since birth, maybe only two or three times in over 13 years. I am very blessed and grateful for this.
Mother's Milk makes a child grow big, healthy & strong. I made fun of her nursing for so long but I am very glad she did. I think its the reason they are so healthy now. Plus good modeling from us, his parents. :-)

clark kent of CA 1:16PM September 22, 2010

I am 52 years old and was diagnosed with having type I diabetes at the age of 5. My parents started noticing problems when I was age 3.
I grew up on a farm. I drank plenty of cow milk and I also spent a lot of time outside.
I've basically been waiting all my life for experts to find a cure for type I diabetes. But really, I've known for years that it will never happen. This disease makes a lot of money for a lot of people, so why try to find a cure.
I read a news article years ago about how a lot of people in some past war that said the US military used/sprayed certain chemicals (Agent Orange) on our troops overseas, and that many of them ended up getting type 2 diabetes. And, that our government pays those people who got type 1 diabetes. Our government recognizes that Agent Orange was the culprit. So I wonder how many other chemicals in our atmosphere causes such diseases?

jennifer Jones of OH 1:14PM September 15, 2010

Type 1 is one of immune disorders . It is genetic disorder U right But It is caused by Immunoglubulin attack to pancreas

J of GA 12:39AM September 10, 2010

take a look at http://opensourcehelminththerapy.org - it really gives a lot of info on this new therapy that can and does help type 1 diabetes patients.

Herbert Smith of NY 5:00AM August 19, 2010

I've been a Type 1 Diabetic since 1990 and am currently 39 years old. My family on both sides had no history of Type 1/Type2 that we were aware of.
I comment because a couple of Mr. Hurley's "reasons," namely #1, "Too big too fast," and #4, "Too much cow's milk," may (or, yes, may not) potentially account for the onset of my type 1 diabetic condition.
The "cow's milk" reason I had read of previously. But this article was the first time I had heard, "Too big too fast" mentioned, and also as a possible reason in addition to "cow's milk" and others.
From 1986-1989, I was in high school and also engaged in competitive athletics. I ate quite a bit, drank more than the average amount of cow's milk (a cheap, readily available protein), and lifted weights constantly, all to put on muscle.
Frankly, I never thought twice about it. This was, after-all, the heyday of muscle-man celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
And I figured that if I was eating/drinking too much of anything, I'd -- and I'd say "reasonably" also -- see the following outcome at worst: I'd get fat.
This would signal to me that I obviously needed to cut my calorie consumption to better match my energy expenditures.
Over those 4 years, I did gain muscle -- never as quickly as I wanted, but I did gain it. Frankly, my parents never let me eat or drink quite as much as I wanted to for those purposes.
But then I began my first year at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1989! There I had a dining hall (all you can eat, breakfast/lunch/dinner and all you can drink milk dispensers!) and a weight room very close to my residence hall.
I continued to weight-train. Frankly, many other students at the University did so also; in fact, there was even a bit of an ongoing competition among fraternity members -- who could do the heaviest bench press and so forth.
Since it was all you could eat/drink at the dining hall, I had 4 large glasses of skim milk breakfast, lunch, dinner -- probably a gallon a day, every day ("Too much cow's milk?"). There was no more need to waste time with going to the store or explaining to Mom why you needed this amount of this/that food or anything
In my first semester, I gained strength/size at a far faster rate than I had in high school ("Too big too fast?"). College life was great on so many levels!
But by the winter break I was feeling very tired all the time
By the start of the second semester, I was urinating constantly. Then I began to throw up uncontrollably.
I took a reprieve from school to return home for a few weeks to recover from this strange "bug." When I finally visited a doctor in the DC area, though, tests led him to diagnose me with Type 1 Diabetes
"Too big too fast" and "Too much cow's milk" -- I speculate that these two of Mr. Hurley's five reasons for the increase in Type 1 cases may go some ways towards explaining the onset of my own case.

Chris Franklin of CA 2:04AM August 18, 2010

I have a 20 year old son, who was born in Chicago Illinois. I breast feed him for 16 mo, because the only milk he would ever take was breast milk. I gained low preganacy weight, did not give him solid foods until 6 months. Our family relocated to Florida when he was 3, so he has been exposed to sun shine. He was diagnosted with type I when he was in 7th grade at the age of 12. He has always been average height and thin.
My point being we have no family history of diabetes, he does not fit one of these theories. So I guess like most of the type I diabetic folks I see at the endocirnologists are all thin. That the theories that are being thrown out here by this article do not really apply to most of the type I's I know. But please keep up the research.

Kathy of FL 12:41PM August 13, 2010