If you have been diagnosed with diabetes, you may wonder how you got it and if your children will get it too. While some people are clearly more likely to get diabetes than others, there are some other factors to consider. You must inherit a predisposition to diabetes and there must be an environmental trigger, such as being overweight or smoking, that causes you to develop diabetes.
Diabetes
Diabetes is a metabolism disorder, in which your body doesn't produce enough or properly use insulin, which is needed to convert glucose into energy. There are three types of diabetes; type 1, in which you produce no insulin, type 2, in which you don't produce enough insulin or it doesn't work properly, and gestational diabetes, which develops during pregnancy and resolves after giving birth.
Genes
Type 2 diabetes runs in families, as do some types of insulin-dependent type 1 diabetes. In fact, if you have a family history of diabetes, you are two to four times more likely to develop the disease, according to Michigan's Genetics Resource Center. Your ancestry is also an important factor in determining if you are predisposed to diabetes. African-American, Hispanic and Native American families are at a higher risk.
What to Look For
There are many red flags in your family and in your own personal history that warn if you are at risk for developing diabetes. If you have a number of family members with diabetes--a brother, a sister or one or both parents have diabetes--you are at an increased risk. In your personal history, you are at an increased risk if you ever had diabetes during pregnancy or had a baby who weighed 9 lbs. or more at birth. Additionally, if you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, are overweight or live a sedentary lifestyle you are at an increased risk.
Prevention/Solution
People who maintain a healthy diet with regular exercise and lose weight if they are overweight can reduce their risk of developing type 2 diabetes by more than 50 percent, according to the University of Birmingham's School of Medicine. Regular exercise, including swimming, jogging or cycling should be done for 30 minutes a day. Smoking doubles the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Sunlight can prevent type 2 diabetes and, to a lesser extent, type 1. Avoiding stress and maintaining low blood pressure also help prevent diabetes.
Risk Statistics
According to the American Diabetes Association, a man with type 1 diabetes has a one in 17 chance of having a child with diabetes. A woman with type 1 diabetes has a one in 25 chance of giving it to her child if she developed it before she was 25 years old, and a one in 100 chance if she developed it after 25. If you have type 2 diabetes, the risk of your child getting it is one in seven if you developed it before the age of 50, and the child's risk is one in 13 if you developed it after age 50.
