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Dr. Gerald Bernstein, an endocrinologist and coordinator of the Friedman Diabetes Program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said that when people with diabetes don’t rigidly control their blood sugar levels, tiny blood vessels in the brain can be affected.
Using data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database, the study authors pulled records on almost 2,600 children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes, and a comparison group of 26,600 people without a type 1 diagnosis.
Children with type 1 diabetes were about 10 years old, while youngsters in the comparison group were about 11 years old, on average.
Each child in the study group was matched with 10 control-group children for factors including sex, and whether they lived in an urban or rural area.
In kids with type 1 diabetes, the risk of developing epilepsy, after adjusting for other factors that might affect the results, appeared to be 2.84 times higher than in people without diabetes.
Children in the study group with intellectual disabilities were also much more likely to develop epilepsy, the study found.
The study authors acknowledged several limitations with the study. The insurance database, for one, didn’t provide information on lifestyle habits, body mass index, physical activity, socioeconomic status and family history. The lack of that information could have skewed the results.
While there may be some connection between type 1 diabetes and epilepsy, the authors concluded that further study is needed.
Based on this study alone, there’s no reason to screen every child and adolescent with type 1 diabetes for epilepsy, Stevens said.
“It would create unnecessary stress and unnecessary testing,” he said.
What parents should do is advocate for the most contemporary management of type 1 diabetes from its onset, Bernstein added. That includes the use of continuous glucose monitoring and insulin pumps, which insurance doesn’t always cover, he said.
With the advantage of those technologies, people might maintain much tighter blood-sugar control over time, he explained.
Findings from the new study were released online March 31 in the journal Diabetologia.
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