Diabetes is usually put into two categories:
In type 1 diabetes, your body attacks and destroys your pancreatic cells that produce insulin. If you have no insulin, your blood sugar level spikes. This condition most often starts in early youth.
In type 2 diabetes, your body has become resistant to insulin and cannot use it properly. This leads to high blood sugar levels.
Type 2 diabetes usually begins developing in people after 40. And before it’s called full-blown diabetes, doctors warn you about pre-diabetes.
But new info warns that your pre-diabetes may actually be a misdiagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes, even if you’re older.
This disease needs to be urgently treated in a very different way than Type 2.
When type 1 diabetes occurs in adults, it is called latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (or LATA, in short).
As in the case of children, your immune system mistakenly identifies your insulin-producing cells as a threat and destroys them.
But, because it starts later in life and often progresses more gradually than type 1 diabetes in children, it seems to resemble type 2 diabetes and can be mistaken for it.
As a result of these similarities, a 2010 study in Diabetes Care has estimated that up to 10 percent of people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes actually have type 1.
If doctors are unsure, they can test the patient’s blood for diabetes-related autoantibodies. The more of these types of autoantibodies in your blood, the more likely that you have or will develop type 1 diabetes.
This is a sure way to distinguish between the two.
But why is it so important that the conditions be separated and diagnosed correctly?
While type 1 diabetics can help keep their blood sugar low by eating low carbohydrate diets, they must receive insulin, usually taken through injections.
Without these injections, they will die, as their bodies have no insulin and no other way to control blood sugar. Therefore, misdiagnosing type 1 as type 2 can be deadly.
Type 2 diabetics, on the other hand, can remedy their condition through lifestyle changes like exercise and dieting.