socalwonderland's comments

Do You Have BOTH Juvenile Diabetes and Autism in Your Family? - Blog Entry

06 Dec 2007 02:25 PM

Hi,

Just found about this blog entry as I was searching on the similar cases - my 5 year old has both Type 1 Diabetes and PDD-NOS. He was diagnosed with the diabetes first at the age 3, and was diagnosed with PDD-NOS this year. BUT I had been suspecting that he was autistic or on the spectrum since he was 1, and had just approached the local school district for the initial evaluation when we found out about his being diabetic (I even told the doctors and the nurses at the hospital about my suspicion). Took us a while, though, to finally get the PDD-NOS diagnosis because we moved from northern California to Southern California. And it really was hard for parents, teachers, and medical personnel to deal with a preschooler to find out the cause of certain behavioral issues knowing that he was diabetic - how do we know being diabetic does/does not play a role? Plus, we (=my husband and I) are both Eastern Asian. Type 1 occurrance in our ethnic group is so much more remote than the rest - about 1 in 150,000-200,000. So it was a sort of natural thing for us to start doubting whether there is any link between Autism (and/or its spectrum) and Type 1 Diabetes.

I'm glad to find this article and all the wonderful people who are leaving the comments to share. Thanks, and keep in touch!