Malnutrition causes unrecognised type of diabetes: experts

Malnutrition can cause its own form of diabetes, health experts said Thursday, calling for "type 5 diabetes" to be recognised globally to help fight the disease in countries already struggling with poverty and starvation.

The most common form of diabetes, type 2, can be caused by obesity and occurs when adults become resistant to the hormone insulin. Type 1, mostly diagnosed in childhood, arises when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin.

But diabetes researchers have been tracking another form of the disease, which often appears in people aged under 30. It also affects insulin production but is less severe than type 1.

And rather than being linked to being overweight or obese like type 2, it affects people who are underweight because they do not eat enough.

A paper published in medical journal The Lancet Global Health shows that more than 25 million people suffer from this "type 5 diabetes", mostly in developing countries.

"We call upon the international diabetes community to recognise this distinct form of the disease," the authors wrote, reflecting a consensus reached by the International Diabetes Federation earlier this year.

The experts settled on calling this form of diabetes type 5, though types 3 and 4 have not been officially recognised.

Diabetes driven by malnutrition is not a new discovery — in the 1980s and 1990s, the World Health Organization classified a form of "malnutrition-related diabetes".

But the UN agency abandoned this classification in 1999 due to a lack of agreement among experts about whether undernourishment alone was enough to cause diabetes. Since then, numerous studies in countries including Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Uganda, Pakistan and Rwanda have indicated that this is possible.