Diabetes in children- when and how diagnosed?

My son didn"t have many symptoms. He drank a lot of pop,but I just thought he was a pop hog. The thing I finally picked up on was that he was crabby and emotional for 2 months. The 1st month the family gave him crap and kept telling him not to be a baby.(boy did we all feel like jerks!)
Then I got to thinking that wasn't at all like him. He had leukemia as a baby so I started to think cancer. Took him to the oncologist and they found high blood sugar.

azure !
The symptoms that lead to a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes in children include the following:

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Weight loss with either increased appetite or loss of appetite (more common in the younger child)
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Increased thirst.
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Increased urination: a toilet-trained child may start wetting, or a baby in diapers will need more frequent changes.
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Dehydration.
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Severe diaper rash that does not respond to the usual treatment.
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Vomiting that is persistent, particularly if it is accompanied by weakness or drowsiness.

I don't know about in the United States, but in the UK it's not something that is tested for as standard. It's only something that is tested for when symptoms are present. The most common of these would be polyuria (frequent urination), polydipsia (excessive thirst), polyphagia (great hunger ... sometimes an insatiable appetite) and unexplained weight loss.

It would then normally be a case of the doctor taking a blood sample and looking, first, at the level of glucose present, followed, by some doctors, who would do a test from the same blood sample for c-peptide (an amino acid that's produced in the pancreas at the same time as insulin) to determine whether c-peptide is present. If it's not present, this gives a clear indication that insulin is not being produced and hence, the diagnosis would be one of type 1 diabetes.

A doctor might decide against an invasive procedure, initially, such as the blood test, and test the urine for glucose. This would indicate that it warrants further investigation.

type 1 is mostly diagnosed in the ER when the child becomes comotose or nearly so and they wake up in the ICU with totally frantic parents.

type 2 is gradual and mostly the symptoms are not noticed except when taken to optometrists office because they can't read.

You can be born with diabetes. My Aunt was diagnosed at 9yrs old.

Diagnosed is by a blood test called Fasting Glucose.