Type 1.5 Diabetes

• What is diabetes?
  • • A chronic health condition where the body is unable to produce insulin and properly break down sugar (glucose) in the blood.
    • You have diabetes because either:
    • Your body makes too little or no insulin.
      This is called type 1 diabetes; or
    • Your body can’t use the insulin it makes.
      This is called type 2 diabetes.
• What is Type 1 diabetes?
  • Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that results in the permanent destruction of insulin producing beta cells of the pancreas. Type 1 is lethal unless treatment with exogenous insulin via injections replaces the missing hormone.
  • What causes Type 1 diabetes?
    • No one really knows what causes type 1 diabetes.
• What is Type 1.5 diabetes (LADA)?
  • Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA) is a genetically-linked, hereditary autoimmune disorder that results in the body mistaking the pancreas as foreign and responds by attacking and destroying the insulin-producing beta islet cells of the pancreas. Simply stated, autoimmune disorders, including LADA, are an “allergy to self.”
  • LADA closely resembles juvenile (type 1) diabetes and shares common physiological characteristics of type 1 for metabolic dysfunction, genetics, and autoimmune features, but LADA does not affect children and is classified distinctly as being separate from juvenile diabetes