The Complications from Diabetes
How often is this type diagnosed?
The medical community rarely diagnoses a type 1.5 diagnosis. LADA doesn’t fit the traditional definition of type 1 or type 2 diabetes. It does have many characteristics of type 1, but a type 1.5 diagnosis happens in adulthood. Alarmingly, there are many similarities between type 1 diabetes and LADA. Researchers have come to believe that type 1 diabetes and LADA are the same disease, only in different variations. Research now claims that LADA is closer to type 1 diabetes than type 2 diabetes.
Factors outside a diabetics control cause type 1 and type 1.5. Type 1.5 happens similarly to type 1, but at a much slower rate. In other words, type 1 is typically discovered in children, but type 1.5 is diagnosed in adults.
Margery Kirsch, MS, RD, a certified diabetes educator with the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, says, “Latent autoimmune diabetes in adults may be a slowly developing kind of type 1 diabetes. Diagnosis usually occurs after age 30. In LADA as in type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune system destroys beta cells. At the time of diagnosis, people with LADA may still produce their own insulin but eventually most will need insulin shots or an insulin pump to control blood glucose levels.”
