Adversity in childhood tied to increased likelihood of Type 2 diabetes in early adulthood: study

It’s common knowledge that our childhood experiences continue to affect us into adulthood, but according to a new study looking at 1.3 million people in Denmark, facing adversity in childhood may also increase your risk for developing Type 2 diabetes later in life.

The study, published last week in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, looked at different types of childhood adversity, such as dealing with parental illness or death, or persistent poverty, and then looked to see if these factors had an impact on the risk of developing diabetes as an adult.

They found that the chance of developing diabetes in early adulthood ranged from 23 to 141 per cent higher for those who had experienced a high amount of adversity in childhood.

In order to create this picture of the risk levels, researchers used data from DANLIFE, a Danish study cohort, which included detail on the background and childhood adversities of children born in Denmark since 1980.

Researchers focused on the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes in early adulthood, specifically looking only at data on participants currently between the ages of 16 and 38 years old who had not been diagnosed with diabetes as children.

Diabetes is a serious, lifelong condition where your body either does not produce enough insulin, or cannot use what it does produce.

The prevalence of Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of diabetes, which is driven by a combination of both genetic and lifestyle factors, has increased substantially over the past 100 years, according to researchers.

One development that scientists have noted over the years is that Type 2 diabetes that develops in early adulthood, as opposed to later in life, tends to have a “more aggressive pathology,” a release from the journal stated, making it all the more important to identify what factors play into this risk.

To measure the vague category of “adversity,” researchers divided the sample group into five groups based on how many years, from as low to 0 to as high as 15, they had experienced one of three types of adversity. These three types were material deprivation, meaning poverty and long-term unemployment on the part of the parents; loss or threat of loss, meaning death or serious illness suffered by a sibling or parent; and family dynamics, which spanned a number of issues including foster care placement, parental psychiatric illness, parental alcohol abuse and being separated from a parent.

Within these categories, researchers judged that 54 per cent of the sample group had received relatively low levels of adversity across childhood, 20 per cent had dealt with material deprivation in early childhood, 13 per cent experienced material deprivation throughout their early and teen years, and nine per cent had a relatively high level of illness or death in the family in their childhood.

Around three per cent of the sample had experienced a high level of adversity across all three categories.

Out of the 1,277,439 participants included in this data set, 2,560 women and 2,300 men developed Type 2 diabetes during the follow-up period.

When researchers looked at the levels of adversity participants faced as children, they found the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes in early adulthood was higher for both men and women who had experienced some form of adversity, compared to the “low adversity” group.

For those who experienced high adversity in all three categories, the risk of developing diabetes was 141 per cent higher in men and 58 per cent higher in women.

This meant 36.2 and 18.6 additional cases of Type 2 diabetes per 100,000 people for men and women respectively.

Researchers noted that the strength of the association between childhood adversity and the risk of Type 2 diabetes in early adulthood lessened when they controlled for parental education level, size for gestational age and preterm birth, but was still present. It lessened the most for women who had experienced high adversity in childhood, with their increased risk dropping from 58 per cent to 23 per cent.

It’s unclear why the association is so much stronger among men than women, but researchers say that these results suggest that the number of people being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in early adulthood could be cut down if there were more interventions to help children experiencing these types of adversity early on.