By Sarah Howard
Exactly 13 years and 1 day ago, my toddler was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. I did not know it then, but a few months prior, in July 2006, Dr. Duk-Hee Lee and colleagues published an article, “A strong dose-response relation between serum concentrations of persistent organic pollutants and diabetes: results from the National Health and Examination Survey 1999-2002.” This article raised the possibility that environmental chemicals could play a role in the development of diabetes.
Since that time, there’s been a flurry of research on the role that various environmental chemicals might play in the development of diabetes. Most of the research has focused on type 2 diabetes, but some has looked at type 1 or gestational diabetes. HEEDS has a metabolism disruptor working group that includes over 100 researchers looking at the role of chemicals in diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and other related diseases. (Email HEEDS if you would like to join this group!)
One of those researchers, Dr. Angel Nadal, Professor of Physiology at IDIBE and CIBERDEM at the Miguel Hernández University of Elche in Spain, spoke in a video produced by the International Society of Endocrinology and the South Asian Federation of Endocrine Societies. He discusses his research on how endocrine disrupting chemicals can predispose people to diabetes by producing insulin resistance, and can disrupt pancreatic beta cell function or mass, as seen in animal studies.
After the shock of my son’s diagnosis wore off (which probably took about a year), I found Dr. Lee’s study, and subsequently started following and reading all the papers I could find on this topic. In 2010, I started my website, Diabetes and the Environment, where I summarize the studies on diabetes/obesity and various environmental factors, focusing on environmental chemicals. The site has now grown to include over 5200 studies—who knew there were that many studies relating to diabetes and the environment? If you go to the References page, you can see the studies categorized by topic. There are over 700 peer-reviewed, published studies on BPA and its substitutes and diabetes/obesity alone—the topic that Dr. Nadal researches.
I’ve encouraged scientists to start looking more into the role of environmental chemicals in type 1 diabetes, as this is still a research gap, but it is encouraging to see a few scientists starting to conduct this desperately needed research. The incidence of type 1 diabetes in children, in industrial countries worldwide, has been increasing about 3% per year since World War 2, and this increase is still unexplained. In many places this increase is largest in the youngest children, under age 5. My hypothesis is that environmental chemicals probably play a role in that increase. On behalf of children like my son, diagnosed at a young age, we need to focus on this possibility, and try to figure out a way to prevent type 1 diabetes. In fact, there are parents looking into ways to prevent type 1 in their children, including ongoing studies, which are described on this website, PreventT1D.org.
In the spirit of World Diabetes Day, let’s recognize the people around the world dealing with any type of diabetes, and use science to work towards a goal of prevention.