What is the main cause of diabetes? Can you suddenly develop diabetes?
What caused me to get diabetes? Researchers have been puzzling over the answer to this question for decades. They have more leads now than ever before but still not many definite answers. We'll summarize points of what is known and you'll have to try to apply them to yourself. First, diabetes runs in families; so whether you got it as a child (only 4 to 5 percent of all diabetics do) or later in life, you still had to have some genes that predisposed you to it. Second, some physical or emotional stresses combined with your hereditary tendency and pushed you over the brink into diabetes. If you got diabetes as a child (the commonest age to be diagnosed is around twelve), recent studies show that a virus related to the mumps virus might have brought on your diabetes by damaging your pancreatic cells that produce insulin (beta cells). Or maybe something went wrong with your immune system and your body itself destroyed some of these cells. For those diagnosed in mid-life ...