My husband has (suspected) hypoglycemia/LADA but didn’t get it until he was 26 years old. However, he had it when our children conceived. Will our children have it? Does that mean they could get it/have it now? I don’t see anything that would lead me to believe they do.

Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA) is simply a slower onset of type 1A (autoimmune) diabetes that shows up in late teen or early adult years, usually requires insulin rather than oral hypoglycemic agents, and implies positive antibody levels to make the diagnosis. The main point is one should not spend many years or decades with small changes in oral agents but progress rather quickly to insulin since it is a form of insulin deficiency and not so much an insulin resistance syndrome. If there is also obesity, this can be difficult to ascertain since there can be two processes working together, and a combination of medications may be needed.

Inheritance is difficult to understand at the moment, but research is going on to answer the question of risk for children. It does not have anything to do with whether it was present at point of conception, just which genes were randomly passed on to children, whether children are exposed to something in environment to “touch off” their genetic susceptibility and, always, whether or not children are overweight or not. You can talk to your husband’s diabetes team to get more specific information based upon what testing has already been done.

SB