This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Familial factors influenced complications of type 1 diabetes
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Complications of nephropathy and retinopathy were linked to familial factors and the presence of diabetes, and women had a higher risk for complications, which shared underlying risk factors, according to recently published data.
“Susceptibility to certain complications of type 1 diabetes, especially retinal damage, has a strong familial and probably genetic component, and women may be more susceptible to these complications than are men,” said David A. Greenberg, PhD, director of the division of statistical genetics and professor of the department of biostatistics, Mailman School of Public Health and New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, in New York.
The researchers analyzed data from patients and families with type 1 diabetes enrolled in the Human Biological Data Interchange of the National Disease Research Interchange (n=8,114).
The risk for developing retinopathy was 1.7-fold higher if a woman with type 1 diabetes was the proband. The risk for developing neuropathy was twofold higher in women than in men.
Patients diagnosed younger than 5 or older than 14 years were less likely to develop complications including retinopathy, nephropathy and neuropathy than patients diagnosed at years in between.
The risk for a complication increased if a sibling had a complication, according to the researchers. The odds ratio for retinopathy if a sibling had retinopathy was 9.9. The odds ratio for nephropathy was 6.18 and the odds ratio for neuropathy was 2.2.
“It will be interesting to see if this holds up for type 2 diabetes as well as type 1,” Greenberg told Endocrine Today.
He continued: “This may mean that the ‘blame’ for complications developing after diabetes onset may not be entirely the ‘fault’ of the patient. It might be easy to say a diabetes sufferer develops complications because they would not control their blood glucose precisely enough, but now the situation is not so simple. At the same time, to the extent that careful control of blood glucose levels does help to prevent or delay complications onset, such control becomes more critical if there is a familial risk for complications in a particular family.” – by Christen Haigh
J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2007;92:4650-4655.