Epilepsy Risk Increases Three Times for Type 1 Diabetes Sufferers
According to insurance-claims study from Taiwan, children and adolescents suffering from Type 1 diabetes are three times likelier to develop epilepsy.
The study findings are coherent with other limited research that indicates a link between type 1 diabetes and epilepsy. However, further research is required to determine how that happens, I-Ching Chou, MD from China Medical University Children's hospital in Taiwan, said in his paper. The researchers published their results online in Diabetologia on March 31, 2016.
"The pathogenetic mechanisms of neurological diseases [such as epilepsy] remain unknown but may be associated with significant long-term neurological sequelae," they stress. Thus, the "causative factors between type 1 diabetes and the increased risk of epilepsy require further investigation," they conclude.
"Teasing out the causes of seizures is difficult to do retrospectively in an administrative database," Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, Massachusetts, told Medscape Medical News.
However, according to previous reports, when Mandl's team of researchers ran the same analysis on US insurance-claims data, they found that the patients suffering from any of the 12 autoimmune diseases were vulnerable to epilepsy and type 1 diabetes patients had a 5.2 times higher risk of developing epilepsy. Dr. Mandl recommends that link between diabetes and epilepsy risk "should certainly be studied further," ideally "in populations where coding can be confirmed with clinical review and characterization of the seizures."
The findings of the current study back the hypothesis that "metabolic abnormalities of type 1 diabetes, such as hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia, may have a damaging effect on the central nervous system and be associated with significant long-term neurological consequences," write Dr Chou and colleagues.
