Scientists have announced that the bacteria found in the guts of one-year-olds can be used to predict their chances of developing type 1 diabetes later in life.
Diabetes most often affects children and adolescents by the body’s immune system attacking and destroying insulin-making cells in the pancreas.
Study co-lead author Malin Peltke from Crown Princess Victoria Children’s Hospital, Sweden, said: ‘This discovery might be used to help identify children at risk of developing type 1 diabetes before or during the early stage of the disease and might provide an opportunity to boost the microbiome. A healthy gut to prevent the disease from taking hold.”
As part of their study, the scientists compared the gut bacteria, known as the microbiome, of children who developed type 1 diabetes with those of people who remained healthy until the age of 20, and found significant differences at 12 months of age between the two groups.
The team reports in the current issue of the Journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes that infants diagnosed with type 1 diabetes have higher levels of bacteria that promote inflammation and are known to be involved in the immune response.
“Although the average age at which diabetes was diagnosed in our study was more than a decade following sample collection, we identified distinct microbial fingerprints at one year of age,” said study co-author Patricia Milich, from the University of Florida.
Professor Eric Triplett of the University of Florida said that the processes that lead to autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes usually begin long before any clinical symptoms of the disease appear.
