Question:
From New York, NY, USA:
I am a 61 year old man who had a typical adult onset of diabetes 3 months
ago, with glucose level at 365. In ten days of diet and glipizine [an
oral medication
for treating Type 2 diabetes] I returned to normal (105 morning average
with just diet). But because I am thin I took the ICA test, and it was
positive. What is my chance of insulin dependency? In what time period?
Is there anything I can do to delay it?
Answer:
It all depends. You may have a poorly-understood condition called slowly
developing Type 1 diabetes, in which case your pancreas is slowly being
destroyed by an
autoimmune process (in the same way
that happens to kids and young adults with typical Type 1 diabetes)
and there's not much that can be done to avoid the destruction with
currently-available therapy. (There is research
under way to try to prevent this destruction, using insulin therapy to
treat people with positive antibody levels.)
It's very difficult to predict the rate of progression of slowly-developing
Type 1 diabetes, since it looks roughly the same as
Type 2 diabetes, except for the antibody levels
that show it's autoimmune in origin, and no one's been doing antibody
testing on Type 2 diabetes patients in any methodical fashion to sort this
new syndrome out.
WWQ
Original posting 31 Dec 96
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