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Even more close relatives with diabetes!

Totto

Totto

Well-Known Member
Messages
2,831
Location
Gotland
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Diet only
I always knew I had a very high risk of diabetes as most relatives on my dad's side had it and also my mum was diagnosed with diabetes in her seventies.

Now it turns out all of my mum's half siblings were diabetic too. I think I need to dig a bit deeper in the family history on the absent grandfather side of my family tree as there also seems to quite a bit of autoimmunity going on there.
 
I have the same in my family - maternal g/father, mother and younger brother with T2, older brother and aunt are celiacs and paternal g/father, father and another brother with severe arthritis to name but a few! Also have various relatives with asthma, eczema and allergies to nuts, dairy and fish. I also have hypothyroidism and Uvietis both autoimmune diseases
 
i think that recognising autoimmune diseases clump together is so new.
well, new to us patients. no idea how new it is to the professionals.

until i encountered this forum i hadn't a clue that the various traditional family 'complaints' were classed as autoimmune. i had heard the term, of course, but i just thought it meant wasting diseases and allergies.
 
It's amazing how much it runs in families. Positively gallops through mine.
I have t2d and hypothyroidism. So does my mum, and five of her 6 sisters.
Her 1 brother has t1d and ms.
His son is t1d.
I have several cousins with t2d and hypothyroidism and other autoimmune nasties with long names.

It is all connected, but like you I didn't put it all together until I was dx'd.

Find it all a tad depressing, but on the other hand I can do quite a lot about most of it and am prewarned about the rest.
I am hoping that by the time my children are my age it will be much better understood. However, I am going to make sure that they know the family history so maybe can recognise the various symptoms earlier than did I.
 
Brunneria said:
i think that recognising autoimmune diseases clump together is so new.
well, new to us patients. no idea how new it is to the professionals.

until i encountered this forum i hadn't a clue that the various traditional family 'complaints' were classed as autoimmune. i had heard the term, of course, but i just thought it meant wasting diseases and allergies.
Click to expand...
I work.in rheumatology and all the conditions we see are autoimmune with the exception of fibromyalgia. I have patients with a whole host of AI diseases and really long family histories. I think it's quite well known that these diseases 'travel in packs'. Type 2 diabetes isn't auto immune though, it can definitely be genetic and I can share some.of the above experiences. Have memories of being about 4 and watching an aunt prepare a massive syringe of insulin for my poor.old granny who was diagnosed with what was probably late onset type 1 and lived only a few years after being diagnosed. Since then most of our (very large!) family have got the curse with both type 1 type 2 and a couple.of Modys thrown in to mix it up a bit. Genetics are funny old things.....
 
@Lally123

While I agree that Type 2 is not currently considered to be autoimmune, there is growing evidence that it may be
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/222766.php
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12059095 (this is old, 2002, but raises a few questions)
http://www.lmp.facmed.utoronto.ca/news/news/current-news/type-2-diabetes-autoimmune-disease (from 2016)

Personally, I hesitate to make any definitive statements on the subject until there is a lot more research - mainly because there are a lot of different varieties of T2 which are currently clumped under the single heading - and by no means all of them involve fatty livers.
 
Brunneria said:
@Lally123

While I agree that Type 2 is not currently considered to be autoimmune, there is growing evidence that it may be
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/222766.php
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12059095 (this is old, 2002, but raises a few questions)
http://www.lmp.facmed.utoronto.ca/news/news/current-news/type-2-diabetes-autoimmune-disease (from 2016)

Personally, I hesitate to make any definitive statements on the subject until there is a lot more research - mainly because there are a lot of different varieties of T2 which are currently clumped under the single heading - and by no means all of them involve fatty livers.
Click to expand...
Yes I know that there is research on going and that there are trials underway regarding immunosuppressive therapies and genetic.testing. I also agree that there are more than one cause of type 2 diabetes and that we will probably end up with further classifications. However as it stands there is no.evidence that type 2 is AI more a suspicion and a hypothesis which needs proving. So we can speculate all we like but until actual evidence comes to light type 2 diabetes has to be treated as non autoimmune. The good news is that it will be beneficial and attractive to big pharma to invest in research, drug trials and development, and if it does ultimately be proven that some types of type 2 diabetes end up being AI, then there are already a wide.variety of immunosuppressive therapies out there with more in the pipeline. Of course it would have to be acknowledged that some of the therapies used currently in rheum cost around £10000 a year per patient which could be prohibitively expensive. Anyway that is all light years away and for now we have to assume that type 2 is genetic or lifestyle caused rather than anything else because there is no other evidence.
 
Brunneria said:
As I previously stated, I prefer not to make those assumptions.
Click to expand...

There is also a fine line in terms of one's close family. When I was diagnosed, I warned my children, and my adult siblings, that there was some evidence/speculation of genetic causes for Type 2 diabetes and that it might be worth mentioning to their doctors, during regular check-ups, that their dad/brother has T2.

This was met mostly with shrugged shoulders (and I think that is probably the right response). My youngest daughter was the exception. She is in her early 20s and just started a very responsible job in London. She has my body type (thin) and is in great health apart from a stubborn extreme iron deficiency, for which the NHS is treating her. She has taken my T2 diagnosis to heart and is making quite a few efforts to adopt a (fairly) low-carb diet herself. I don't think this is doing her any harm, but she already had a pretty healthy diet.

So I realized how important it is to be careful with this kind of "family news" as some people are more sensitive to it than others.

(BTW I have a first cousin with T1 since teenage years, and another first cousin with T2 diagnosed in his late 30s.)
 
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