Why I am a Diabetic? Will my children also be Diabetic?

Many patients ask me this question. What decides he or she becomes diabetic?

Answer is not very clear, yet we can say that both Genetic factors and environmental factors play a role.

Type 2 Diabetes
Type 2 diabetes runs in families. In part, this tendency is due to children having a poor diet and lack of exercise, often learned from their parents, but there is also a genetic basis.
In general, if you have type 2 diabetes, the risk of your child getting diabetes is 1 in 7 if you were diagnosed before age 50 , and 1 in 13 if you were diagnosed after age 50.
Some scientists believe that a child's risk is greater when the parent with type 2 diabetes is the mother. If both you and your partner have type 2 diabetes, your child's risk is about 1 in 2.
People with certain rare types of type 2 diabetes have different risks. If you have the rare form called maturity-onset diabetes of the young (MODY), your child has almost a 1-in-2 chance of getting it, too.

Even if you don't have any family history of Diabetes, you can get Type 2 Diabetes. This is due to environmental factors.
Environmental factors include over eating, over weight, lack of exercises, stress etc.
Sudden change in lifestyle, from a semi-starvation state to over-fed state [along with genetic factors] is said to be the reason behind Type 2 Diabetes epidemic in India.
Type 1 Diabetes
In most cases of type 1 diabetes, the child need to inherit risk factors from both parents. These factors must be more common in the whites because the whites have the highest rate of type 1 diabetes. As most people who are at risk do not get diabetes, researchers are trying to find out what the environmental triggers are.

One trigger might be related to cold weather. Type 1 diabetes develops more often in winter than in summer and is more common in places with cold climates.
Another trigger might be viruses. A virus that has only mild effects on most people triggers type 1 diabetes in others.
Early diet may also play a role. Type 1 diabetes are less common in people who are breastfed, and in those who eat solid foods at later ages.
In many people, the development of type 1 diabetes seems to take many years. In experiments that followed, the relatives of people with type 1 diabetes, researchers found that most of those who later got diabetes had certain autoantibodies in their blood for years before.
(Antibodies are proteins that destroy bacteria or viruses. Autoantibodies are antibodies 'gone bad,' which attack the body's own tissues.)
In general, there is more environmental factors contributing than genetic factors in type 1 .
If you are a man with type 1 diabetes, the odds of your child getting diabetes are 1 in 17. If you are a woman with type 1 diabetes and your child was born before you were 25, your child's risk is 1 in 25; if your child was born after you turned 25, your child's risk is 1 in 100.
Your child's risk is doubled if you developed diabetes before age 11. If both you and your partner have type 1 diabetes, the risk is between 1 in 10 and 1 in 4.