Can a person have both type 1 and type 2 diabetes?

Can a person have both type 1 and type 2 diabetes?

Anne Peters, MD, FACP, CDE (Professor and Director of Clinical Diabetes Programs, USC Keck School of Medicine) gives expert video advice on: What causes type 2 diabetes?; Does type 1 diabetes only occur in childhood?; Is one type of diabetes worse than the other? and more...

It turns out that you can have both 1 and type 2 diabetes. In order to understand this, though, you actually have to understand a little bit more about type 2 diabetes, because type 2 diabetes is probably an adaptation for survival. It probably is a set of genes that helped our ancestors to survive famine, because back in the old days we didn't have food everywhere. We went through periods of eating and then fasting: literally not having food for weeks. Therefore we needed to store fat very efficiently. The place that our bodies store fat the best is right in the centre, and that's called central obesity. That storage form of fat is right there, right next to your liver, your pancreas and your stomach, and it's great. It immediately can put sugar back into your blood if you're starving. However, if you're living in a society, like our modern societies, where food isn't an issue for most people (not everybody, but for most) that central fat just grows and grows, and now instead of becoming a good thing it becomes a bad thing. All that fat by your liver causes it to make abnormal cholesterol particles and causes it to become inflamed; all these things start happening that cause diabetes but also the risk for heart attack and stroke. So people with type 2 diabetes and central obesity, and that's most people with type 2 diabetes, have a risk for heart attack and stroke. So, you can have type 1 diabetes, meaning your pancreas doesn't work anymore because it was attacked by antibodies, and you can come from a family where, say, your mother or father had type 2 diabetes; you can have central fat, high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels and it means you have both type 1 and type 2 in a way. However, what's really important is not the names 'type 1' and 'type 2', but that if people have central fat, they need to be extra careful to avoid having heart attacks and strokes.