Diabetes is a very complicated disease that affects a lot of people, and it doesn’t have a very clear pattern of appearing, a fact that makes this disease a real danger. If you are confronted with this disease or a loved one is, or if you simply want to better understand it to know what are the risks of you, your children, or anyone else who you love of developing it, read the following lines to learn about the genetics of type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Genetics of type 1 diabetes

Those who are in the biggest danger of getting type 1 diabetes are the ones who inherit the risk factors from both of their parents, but inheriting the risk doesn’t mean that you will inherit the disease necessarily, only a small amount of the people who inherit these risk factors from their parents actually ending up with the dreaded disease. This is precisely why type 1 diabetes baffles researchers everywhere, and why the interest in this disease is so high, all of these people trying to figure out what are the environmental factors that ultimately make the bearers of the risk factors to suffer from type 1 diabetes.

The environmental factors that researches have discovered to be linked with the development of type 1 diabetes are cold weather, viruses, and early diet. The cold weather has been linked with the appearance of type 1 diabetes due to the fact that people who live in places with cold climates tend to develop this health issue, overall this disease developing more often in winter than in summer for example. Another suspected trigger of type 1 diabetes is a virus that most probably affects the bearers of the type 1 diabetes risk factors more than it affects normal people, triggering the disease. The last environmental factor that has been linked with the development of type 1 diabetes is the early diet of people, refering to the fact that those who were breastfed when they were babies are less likely to fall victim to this disease than those who began eating solid foods earlier, not being breastfed for a long enough period.

Genetics of type 2 diabetes

Just like type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes is linked to environmental factors as well, but as opposed to type 1 diabetes, the type 2 form has a stronger link to the lineage and family history. This strong link between family history and type 2 diabetes has been proven through studies that have been done on twins, while the researches done regarding the environmental factors show that the lifestyle that people lead weighs a lot in the development of the disease. If you are overweight and you don’t exercise, you most probably come from a family that leads the same lifestyle as you, therefore it can be pretty difficult to figure out whether the disease has developed because of the unhealthy lifestyle that you lead and that favors the appearance of the disease, or through no fault of your own, based solely on genetics. All in all, what you have to remember to stay away from type 2 diabetes, or at least to delay the appearance of this disease as much as you can is that you have to exercise daily, eat healthy foods, and maintain a healthy and ideal weight.