My six year old niece was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes yesterday, and since her father has had a type 1 diabetes for 22 years, my ever paranoid mother has been testing his children’s blood for awhile and seems to have caught the disease in the extremely early stages. The doctor says possibly within days, and it’s the earliest case he has ever seen. Are there any studies that shed light on this being a benefit for her treatment?

If, as seems most likely, your brother and his daughter both have type 1A (autoimmune) diabetes, then the slow process of destruction of the insulin producing cells in the pancreas has almost certainly been progressing over some years. Nonetheless early detection of insulin dependence, even if it doesn’t affect the long term outlook directly, does mean that initial management and education can be carried out almost always without hospitalisation in an atmosphere free of the additional anxiety of acute illness. This in turn makes it easier to institute the requirements for meticulous blood glucose control like carbohydrate counting and using the new insulins well as the almost pain free glucose monitors. Nowadays, some six year olds can successfully use an insulin pump.

DOB