Yahoo! News Story - Diabetes and MS linked in Danish study - Yahoo! News

July 13, 2006

Lucky ME my type 1 diabetes hit me in 93 and

then my MS in 99

Bill

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People with type 1 diabetes are

more than three times more likely to develop multiple sclerosis

(MS) than are those without diabetes, new research from Denmark

shows.

In addition, the two diseases appear to be linked, albeit

to a weaker extent, within families.

Both type 1 diabetes and MS are auto-immune diseases, in

which the body mounts an aberrant immune response against its

own tissues -- attacking insulin-producing cells in the case of

diabetes, and the myelin sheath surrounding neurons in MS.

The new, population-based study is not the first to reveal

an association between type 1 diabetes and MS. However,

previous evidence had come from relatively small numbers of

patients.

As reported in the Archives of Neurology, Dr. Nete M.

Nielsen, from the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen, and

colleagues assessed the occurrence of MS in 6078 patients with

type 1 diabetes over more than a decade of follow-up.

In addition, the researchers evaluated the presence of type

1 diabetes in 14,771 first-degree relatives of 11,862 MS

patients.

Eleven cases of MS developed in the diabetes patients,

while only 3.38 cases would be expected based on the rates in

the general population. Thus, patients with type 1 diabetes had

a more than three-fold increased risk of MS.

First-degree relatives of MS patients had a 63 percent

increased risk of developing type 1 diabetes, the team

calculated from their data. However, after accounting for the

possibility of also being related to a patient with type 1

diabetes, the excess risk fell to 44 percent.

"To our knowledge, the present study is the first truly

nationwide cohort study to demonstrate intraindividual and, to

a lesser degree, intrafamilial co-occurrence of MS and type 1

diabetes," the investigators write.

"The underlying mechanisms remain unknown," they say, "but

may involve both genetic and environmental factors."

SOURCE: Archives of Neurology, July 2006.

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