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Diabetes – What is Children with Type 2 Diabetes ? | Type 2 Diabetes in Children | Child and Type 2 Diabetes Problems

Type 2 diabetes is a disease more commonly associated with adults. But type 2 diabetes in children is on the rise, fueled largely by the obesity epidemic.There’s plenty you can do to help manage or prevent type 2 diabetes in children. Encourage your child to eat healthy foods, get plenty of physical activity and maintain a healthy weight. If diet and exercise aren’t enough, your child may need oral medication or insulin treatment to manage his or her blood sugar.Type 2 diabetes is extremely complex. There is an underlying genetic susceptibility that, when exposed to a variety of social, behavioral and environmental factors, unmasks diabetes. While this genetic background is important, the alarming increase in new cases of children with type 2 diabetes underscores the role of environmental factors.

Maintaining blood sugars in the normal range requires a delicate balance between the amount of available insulin and is action at the cellular level. Experts do not agree as to whether diminished insulin secretion or insulin resistance is the primary problem in the population of adults with type 2 diabetes. From what has been observed in children the abnormality appears to be that of inappropriate insulin action progressing to later failure of the insulin-producing cells.Puberty has been identified as important in the development of type 2 diabetes in children. Changes in hormone levels during this period cause insulin resistance and decreased insulin action. Therefore it is quite understandable that type 2 diabetes in children most often occurs during mid-puberty although cases as young as 4 years of age have been reported.

Obesity is another significant factor. It is well understood that obese children produce too much insulin so that when the need for more insulin arises, they are likely to be unable to produce enough more. In addition, the presence of too much fatty tissue leads to insulin resistance. Over time, high blood sugar can cause problems with the eyes, heart, blood vessels, nerves, and kidneys. High blood sugar also makes a person more likely to get serious illnesses or infections.In the past, doctors believed that type 2 diabetes was an adult disease and that type 1 diabetes was a children’s disease. Now, more and more children are getting type 2 diabetes.Finding out that your child has diabetes can be scary. But your child can live a long, healthy life by learning to manage the disease.

As an unfortunate consequence of the current epidemic of obesity among children and adolescents, physicians can logically expect to encounter increasing numbers of young patients presenting initially with signs and symptoms associated with uncontrolled hyperglycemia and relatively advanced cases of diabetes. Understanding the wide array of risk factors for type 2 diabetes that frequently accompany obesity can facilitate diagnosis and proper classification of the condition, especially within these younger age groups for whom diagnoses of type 1 diabetes were once handed down practically by default.

The development of type 2 diabetes is closely related to obesity about 95 per cent of children with type 2 diabetes are overweight at diagnosis. Given that the proportion of Canadian children who are overweight has tripled in the last 30 years, it is not surprising that incidence of type 2 diabetes among youth is rising. About half of all children with type 2 diabetes do not have any symptoms and are diagnosed only when screened for other disorders related to obesity. The Canadian Diabetes Association recommends screening for type 2 diabetes in obese children 10 years of age and older who have at least two of the risk factors noted above.