2012 Volume 12 Issue 1 Pages 22-31
Type 1 diabetes mellitus (insulin dependent diabetes mellitus,IDDM) occurs mainly in childhood, however, the management of type 1 diabetes had been poor in Japan until the 1980s because of a low incidence of this disease and a subsequent lack of medical knowledge about it. In 1979, the international pediatric association for diabetes mellitus named ISGD (international study group on diabetes in children and adolescents) invited Dr. Teruo Kitagwa a Japanese pediatrician who works in this field to join them. He explained about diabetes in Japanese children. After international communication became common in Japanese pediatricians who were interested in diabetes, Japanese pediatricians were able to get new and useful information about type 1 diabetes from Western countries where type 1 diabetes is common. As a result, the prognosis of type 1 diabetes in children started getting better in the late 1990s in Japan. However, from a urine screening program , we found that the incidence of type 2 diabetes, one of the most common metabolic disorders usually appearing in the 4th or 5th decade of life, is not unusual in Japanese children. Patients with type 2 diabetes are detected by a urine glucose test of asymptomatic school children. This screening was started in the Tokyo area in 1974 and from 1992, the Ministry of Education made this screening mandatory for all school children. Currently in Japan the incidence of childhood type 2 diabetes is higher than type 1 diabetes. In this paper we describe the development of the clinical studies of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes in Japanese children during past 40 years in Japan
