Diabetes: A growing impact on our children

Did you know?

• The incidence of overweight and obese children and teens with type 1 diabetes has tripled in the past 20 years.
• Diabetes affects more than 1,700 Wisconsin children, and now impacts children earlier and earlier in life.
• It is one of the most common severe chronic diseases for children.
• Wisconsin children are impacted at double the national rate. Those rates are on the rise.

Doctors and scientists do not yet understand the cause of type 1 diabetes. Without understanding the cause, there can be no cure.

Like cancer, high blood pressure and other diseases, there is a genetic component to type 1 diabetes. Genes are activated and deactivated at different times, and for different reasons. Investigators in the Max McGee National Research Center for Juvenile Diabetes at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin are asking questions such as:

• Which genes play a role in diabetes?
• How do those genes function in a person with diabetes?
• Can we detect the processes that cause diabetes before it develops?
• Can we prevent or cure diabetes based on our discoveries?