Finnish researchers acknowledged that the associations between asthma and type 1 diabetes are still unclear so they conducted a study to look more into the link between these two immune-mediated conditions.
In their study abstract they state that they conducted a nationwide case-cohort study with Finnish children and used a novel statistical approach.
The children in the study were born between January 1st 1981 and December 31st 2008. There were 81,473 diagnosed with asthma and 9,541 diagnosed with type 1 diabetes up to age 16 by the end of 2009. This data was located in the Central Drug Register that the Social Insurance Institution of Finland keeps.
Regarding the new statistical approach, researchers used “a multistate modelling approach to estimate transition rates between healthy and disease states since birth. Hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated to represent the change in the transition rate between the disease states.”They adjusted for sex and birth decade.
What are the Ties Between Type 1 and Asthma?
The researchers found that a previous asthma diagnosis raised the risk of developing type 1 diabetes by a whopping 41%.
Conversely, a previous diagnosis of type 1 diabetes lowered the risk of developing asthma by 18%.
Based on these findings the researchers conclude that there is an implication here that the relationship between type 1 diabetes and asthma is “more complex than previously thought, and its direction depends on the sequential appearance of the diseases.”
Do you have asthma and type 1 diabetes and if so, which diagnosis came first?