CHICAGO (Reuters) –- The number of European children under 5 with type 1 diabetes could double by 2020, an alarming trend that suggests environmental factors may be playing a role, researchers said.

They said cases of type 1, or juvenile, diabetes in older children will rise significantly as well, and the findings likely apply to children in other regions.
They do not know what could be causing the increase.
“By 2020, the predicted number of new cases is 24,400, but this change is not shared evenly between the age groups, with incidence of type 1 diabetes in the youngest age group expected to double in both sexes,” Dr. Chris Patterson of Queen’s University in Belfast, Gyula Soltesz of Pecs University in Hungary and colleagues wrote in the Lancet medical journal.
Type 1 diabetes represents about 10 percent of the 180 million cases of diabetes globally. It occurs when the immune system goes haywire and starts destroying insulin-producing cells in the pancreas needed to control blood sugar.
These patients typically need daily insulin therapy to control their diabetes, which is a different disease from the far more common type 2 diabetes.
To predict the future burden of type 1 diabetes, Patterson, Soltesz and colleagues analyzed data from 17 European countries on 29,311 cases of type 1 diabetes during 1989 to 2003.
They found that diagnoses were rising at a rate of 3.9 percent per year overall. And among children under age 5, they were rising 5.4 percent per year.
Based on these trends, the team estimates the total number of European children under age 15 with type 1 diabetes will rise 70 percent to 160,000 by 2020, up from 94,000 now.
“These findings suggest that the incidence of type 1 diabetes is increasing even faster than before, pointing toward harmful changes in the environment in which contemporary children live,” Dr. Dana Dabelea of the University of Colorado in Denver wrote in a commentary.
Dabelea said in a telephone interview that Europe has very good data on diabetes but good statistics on the rate of type 1 diabetes are lacking for many countries, including the United States.
“I think that these data from Europe are telling us what is going to happen in the United States,” she said.
And the rest of the world is “even less able to appreciate the consequences of this epidemic of type 1 diabetes,” Dabelea said, noting that there are no regional data on type 1 diabetes in Africa, Asia or South America, which she said will likely have the highest rates of type 1 diabetes.
Dabelea said it is not clear why the rates are rising, particularly among young children.
“What we know is that these rates don’t seem to be increasing because of genetic susceptibility. This means the environment is becoming more permissive for type 1 diabetes,” Dabelea said.
“But what exactly is harmful in the environment, we don’t know,” she said.
U.S. government health experts have launched The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young study to better understand what might be causing the increase including possible infections in the womb and childhood infections.