Babies and the ‘betes…
I’v always wanted kids. Not now!! Definitely not now, I have too many places to travel/irresponsible things to do/selfish ways to spend money right now to have kids, but one day, I’d like to have one. Actually, I’d like to have one naturally and adopt another one for a total set of two. Boys or girls doesn’t matter, I would just like two healthy kids one day. Aside from adoption being one of the greatest gifts you can give in this world, I’m also interested in adopting because I know the stress of a pregnancy will be tremendous on me and my diabetes, both physically and mentally.
Women with diabetes have healthy babies all the time, but there’s a lot of work that goes into securing that outcome. I’d love to experience being pregnant once though, and with all the modern technology we have, there’s no reason I can’t safely have a healthy baby one day. In fact, one of my favorite d-bloggers and the OG of the DOC, has been chronicling her pregnancy with diabetes, and I have been amazed at how healthy and awesome it’s been for her.
But there’s one thing that makes me hesitate. Guilt. Every woman with diabetes who has kids asks herself at one time or another: Am I going to give my kid diabetes? Is it fair for me to bring a child into this world knowing they’re at a higher risk for getting this disease?
I’ve always thought the math was simple – if you have Type 1, the chance of your child/sibling/any direct relation to you is higher, right? Well, kind of. I was asked the question of “how much higher?” the other day, and I realized I didn’t know the stats. I know the risk of passing Type 1 to a child is lower than Type 2, which holds very strong genetic ties, but how much lower? Am I destined to pass this burden on to my child one day? It took some serious research to dig up the official numbers, but it was well worth it for the peace of mind that followed. Here’s how it really breaks down, according to the world-renowned Joslin Diabetes Center, with commentary from Dr. Warram, a lecturer in Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health.
- · If an immediate relative (parent, brother, sister, son or daughter) has type 1 diabetes, one’s risk of developing type 1 diabetes is 10 to 20 times the risk of the general population; your risk can go from 1 in 100 to roughly 1 in 10 or possibly higher, depending on which family member has the diabetes and when they developed it.
- · If one child in a family has type 1 diabetes, their siblings have about a 1 in 10 risk of developing it by age 50.
- · The risk for a child of a parent with type 1 diabetes is lower if it is the mother — rather than the father — who has diabetes. “If the father has it, the risk is about 1 in 10 (10 percent) that his child will develop type 1 diabetes — the same as the risk to a sibling of an affected child,” Dr. Warram says. On the other hand, if the mother has type 1 diabetes and is age 25 or younger when the child is born, the risk is reduced to 1 in 25 (4 percent) and if the mother is over age 25, the risk drops to 1 in 100 — virtually the same as the average American. (SWEET! – blogger’s commentary added for effect)
- · If one of the parents developed type 1 diabetes before age 11, their child’s risk of developing type 1 diabetes is somewhat higher than these figures and lower if the parent was diagnosed after their 11th birthday.(Crap. – blogger was diagnosed at age 10).
Ok – so that’s good news! Since I’m already 27 (and not planning on kids for several more years anyways), I won’t have the added risk of being under 25, but I’ll lose that advantage because I was diagnosed before what appears to be the magical cut-off age of 11.
The Joslin stats are also helping me understand why it’s not weird that no one else in my family has Type 1 diabetes – its just not that genetically linked. Lucky me – winner winner, chicken dinner, I got the auto-immune version of drawing the shortest straw. But I’m also the tallest kid – so HA!
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