WASHINGTON — An American toddler may be the youngest person ever diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
It is a disease that is commonly linked to obesity in middle-aged and elderly adults. But over the last few decades, as children in this country have gotten heavier, the age of onset has come down.
This child — a 3-year-old girl from Texas — showed up at a clinic in the Houston area with excessive urination and thirst.
Tests quickly showed high blood sugar levels, but she tested negative for antibodies that usually indicate type 1 diabetes — the autoimmune version of the disease that typically is diagnosed in childhood.
“The age is extremely unusual,” says Dr. Fran Cogen, director of diabetes services at the Children’s National Health System. All the same, Cogen says, she was not totally surprised by the news
“It only re-emphasized the current state of the type 2 diabetes epidemic that we are seeing in younger children,” she says.
At Children’s National, the percentage of children with diabetes who are type 2 has gone up steadily in recent years. Part of the reason is hereditary — diabetes runs in families. But a lot of the fodder for the “epidemic” is related to lifestyle.
The 3-year-old in Texas was 77 pounds when she was diagnosed at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. Her weight and her body mass put her in the top five percentile for kids her age.
The lead doctor on her case, Dr. Michael Yafi, told a diabetes conference in Europe (the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) that the family ate a high-calorie diet rich in fat.
Yafi says this child was helped by medication combined with a total family lifestyle change — lowering calorie intake and increasing physical activity.
“It’s really a family disease,” says Cogen, adding that treatment works best when siblings and parents are on board. “The only thing you can really change is your environment, and the factors that you can modify involve behavior, and that has to do with exercise and nutrition.”
Cogen says these lifestyle changes can be incredibly effective but adds, “quite honestly, it is harder to do than taking a pill.”
