NEW YORK (Reuters Health) -– People who attend college may be at greater risk of developing a less common form of diabetes associated with autoimmunity, new study findings suggest.

Among more than 56,000 adults living in Norway, those who reached university were nearly twice as likely as adults who did not finish high school to develop autoimmune diabetes - an adult form of the disease similar to the type 1 diabetes that typically manifests in childhood.
Clearly, higher education itself does not increase the risk of autoimmune diabetes, study author Lisa Olsson of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden told Reuters Health. Rather, these results suggest that people who go to university have some other factor in their lives that predisposes them to this type of diabetes, she explained.
“Subjects with high education may have a different lifestyle (or) be exposed to other environmental factors than people with low education, which may increase their risk,” Olsson said in an e-mail.
She added that she and her colleagues used statistical tools to eliminate the influence of traditional risk factors - such as a family history of diabetes, obesity, smoking and lack of exercise - from the results, published in Diabetes Care.
Furthermore, the risk of developing autoimmune diabetes was relatively low - out of more than 56,000 adults, only 122 were diagnosed with autoimmune diabetes. In contrast, more than 1,500 developed the more common form of the disease, type 2, which is closely related to obesity.
In autoimmune diabetes, the immune system destroys beta cells, which are responsible for producing insulin.