#type-1-diabetes

#type-1-diabetes

Health Secretary Wes Streeting said he would meet the father of a two-year-old girl who died from undiagnosed type 1 diabetes. Lyla Story, from Hull, died in May last year less than 24 hours after her mother had taken her to their doctor who diagnosed acute tonsillitis, an inquest heard in September. Her father, John Story, is campaigning for Lyla's Law which would see routine tests for those showing symptoms of type 1 diabetes.

All UK children could be offered screening for type 1 diabetes using a simple finger-prick blood test, say researchers who have been running a large study. Currently, many young people go undiagnosed and risk developing a life-threatening complication called diabetic ketoacidosis that needs urgent hospital treatment. Identifying diabetes earlier could help avoid this and mean treatments to control problematic blood sugar levels can be given sooner.

Scientists aren't totally sure why cases are climbing. It's partly because we've gotten better at detecting type 1 diabetes early on. But that's not the whole story. Researchers have a handful of hypotheseslike maternal and early-childhood diets, exposure to microbes in the environment, viral infections early in life or even gut bacteriathat could be potential factors in triggering this autoimmune condition.

A little more than a century ago a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. Today, thanks to extraordinary scientific progress, many people with type 1 diabetesespecially in developed countriescan enjoy long, healthy lives. I'm profoundly grateful that my older son, now 16, was born into this era of possibility. His diagnosis in 2020 came at a time when innovation and advocacy had transformed what it meant to live with this chronic autoimmune disease.

Roughly there's about 300,000 people living with diabetes in Ireland and 90% of that is type two diabetes. And about 10% will be type one.

Sarah Gleeson, from Cork, was shocked when she was diagnosed with gestational diabetes during her first pregnancy seven years ago. 'I've always been health conscious, and we'd been trying to get pregnant for about 10 months, so I was very conscious of my diet,' she says.