What is Type 1 Diabetes?

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition, where your immune system creates antibodies, that causes damage to the beta-cells of your pancreas, which are responsible for making insulin.

Over time, the amount of insulin your pancreas can produce continues to decrease. For this reason, patients with type 1 diabetes need to have insulin injections to make up for the insulin their pancreas can no longer produce.

If your body doesn’t have enough insulin, then the glucose (sugar) levels in your blood increase and can cause symptoms such as increased thirst, urinating more, fatigue, blurry vision and weight loss.

Whilst type 1 diabetes usually affects children and teenagers, it can also occur later in life and is given the term “Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults” or “LADA” for short.

During a first consultation, an Endocrinologist should go through your symptoms and organise blood tests to check for autoimmune antibodies and how much insulin your body producing. You will usually start insulin injections at the time of or soon after diagnosis.

It is important that an Endocrinologist oversees the care of type 1 diabetes, to keep patients up to date with the latest technologies available, and to monitor for associated autoimmune diseases on an annual basis.