2023-11-13 15:57:37
The Covid pandemic is behind us, but the diabetes emergency remains especially among children and young people, and Italy is teaching prevention. It is the first country in the world to have established type 1 diabetes screening, thanks to the recent approval of law 130/2023 which as the first and important positive consequence will allow the prevention of ketoacidosis, a serious acute complication which can present itself as an onset of diabetic disease. Today, in fact, 40% of type 1 diabetes diagnoses occur late following a dramatic onset in which the disease manifests itself with ketoacidosis, a serious metabolic imbalance that leads to emergency room and can leave permanent damage.
“It is therefore urgent and necessary that the implementing decrees of the law be issued as soon as possible to identify children and young people at high risk, before there is a decompensation that can even endanger their lives”, declares Valentino Cherubini, president of the Italian Society of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetology (Siedp) and director of Pediatric Diabetology at the Ospedali Riuniti of Ancona, who launches an appeal on the occasion of World Diabetes Day. “If the disease has an early onset and appears in children under 10 years of age – he underlines – it causes a loss of 16 years of life expectancy. However, if diagnosed in time, treated and well controlled, as adults the life expectancy is the same as that of the population without diabetes.”
“Once the young patients with a high probability of developing type 1 diabetes have been identified – underlines the specialist – parents must be informed of the symptoms to pay attention to and provide for close monitoring of blood sugar levels. A fundamental role of education and prevention which it will have to be carried out by pediatric endocrinologists who will be responsible for following not only the children and young people who receive the diagnosis, but also all those who will have to be followed and monitored before the development of diabetes”.
Screening, allowing the identification of subjects at risk – highlight the Siedp experts – is also the only way to be able to use new therapies in the future such as teplizumab, which allows the onset of type 1 diabetes to be delayed by 2-3 years precisely in these subjects and is currently only authorized in the USA.
All this is even more important – we read in a note – taking into account that the incidence of type 1 diabetes is growing after the Covid-19 pandemic: before 2020 the increase in diagnoses was 2-4% every 2 years, between 2019 and 2021 this number increased tenfold and reached 27%.
“It has been shown – Cherubini also reports – that type 2 diabetes is also on the rise among very young people, a metabolic disease which until some time ago was typical of adulthood or advanced age. In this case due to being overweight , obesity, incorrect lifestyles, there is an increase in insulin resistance and therefore in blood sugar levels: data from the Sweet global registry have shown that in the last 10 years the frequency of new diagnoses in under 20s has increased by 9% every two years “. We are therefore “heading towards an epidemic of type 2 diabetes even among the very young – concludes the specialist – and it is essential that pediatric endocrinologists, on the front line to deal with such an emergency, provide information, education and prevention to stem this phenomenon” .
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