Diseases/Conditions

Childhood Diabetics Will Face Alzheimer’s While Still Young

September 22, 2011 by GaiaHealth in Featured with 4 Comments

Memory on Beach

Reports are now coming out showing that diabetes causes Alzheimer’s. So what does this bode for the future of children with diabetes? Frankly, it doesn’t look good.

Alzheimer’s disease related to insulin deficiency, and insulin deficiency is the definition of diabetes. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise to find that diabetics are twice as likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s.

The connection becomes even more obvious when you know that insulin is required by the brain to make memories. Therefore, when insulin is out of balance, memories can’t form. The connection is known. What’s a mystery is why it took medical science such a long time to look for evidence of the relationship between diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

In Diabetics are more prone to dementia,The Times of India reports on a Japanese study of people over age 60. They found that diabetics were twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. They also found that people without diabetes who had impaired glucose metabolism—that is, they were pre-diabetic—were also more likely to become Alzheimer’s patients.

By 2008, the Salk Institute had noted the connection between diabetes and Alzheimer’s when they did research on diabetic mice. They found that these mice were developing memory problems equivalent to several human years earlier than Alzheimer’s is generally noted to occur. The brief video below is from 2008; it’s a news report documenting the Salk Institute’s discovery:

What will become of all the children who are now diabetic? Aside from facing shortened lives with the specters of neuropathy and amputations, it seems that they may also be facing dementia in their forties, perhaps even earlier in some.

Conventional medicine still doesn’t comprehend the severity of the diabetes epidemic. In fact, they seem far more interested—thrilled even—in all the extra business it brings. Their treatment consists primarily of fighting symptoms with drugs, not of reversing it. Yet, unless a person is born with diabetes, the disease is nearly always reversible through the simple expedients of diet and exercise.

If conventional medicine truly wanted to resolve this coming disaster, they would do battle with Agribusiness and Big Pharma, the causes of childhood diabetes. Of course, they don’t. It is, apparently, far more important to the medical system of today to rake in the money than to have a concern for the lives of their patients. As a result, today’s children face desperately bleak futures.

More Information: Is Alzheimer’s a Form of Diabetes?

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  • Gloria

    It is somewhat troubling that the article, as well as linked websites, do nothing to differentiate between lifestyle induced type 2 diabetes and insulin dependent type 1. Only after following the links, do I find that it’s more likely to be type 2 diabetes which is a concern, but the information remains vague. Almost as if there is only one kind of diabetes, and type 1 is a non-issue.

    How does this article concern type 1 diabetics? How is the management of insulin production and use related to the development of Alzheimer’s? I’m left with less information, not more.

    • GaiaHealth

      I appreciate your concern, Gloria. The original study did not make a distinction between the two. What it did note is that higher postload glucose levels are closely associated with Alzheimer’s, but fasting plasma glucose levels were not. Here’s a link to the abstract: http://www.neurology.org/content/77/12/1126.abstract

      Please note that the point of the article was not to dissect the study, but to point out the serious implications of so many children with diabetes today. That people with diabetes are far more likely to develop Alzheimer’s, and to develop it much younger, is a time bomb waiting to go off.

  • Gloria

    Thank you for your response.

    I’m the sometimes frustrated parent of a type 1 diabetic learning as I go. I realize that most diabetes info these days is type 2 related, since type 1 is only around 10% of the group.
    Thanks for the link.

    • GaiaHealth

      All my best to you, Gloria. It can’t be easy.

      By the way, I suspect that type 1 is probably a smaller group than that. Type 2 can merge into type 1, and I’d bet that most docs over-diagnose type 1.

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