Keywords:
Childhood diseases; Diabetes complications; Diabetes mellitus, type 2; Indigenous health.
Abstract:
Over the past decades, the incidence of type 2 diabetes, rarely diagnosed in children and adolescents before the 1990s, has been increasing in young people in several populations, including Australia. Early onset type 2 diabetes appears to have a more severe phenotype compared with adult onset type 2 diabetes, and has a high prevalence of complications already present at the time of diagnosis despite the patients’ young age and short duration of the disease.
We aimed to describe the characteristics of Western Australian children aged less than 10 years diagnosed with type 2 diabetes between June 2000 and June 2017. Demographic and clinical data for children diagnosed with type 2 diabetes during the study period were extracted from the population‐based WA Children's Diabetes Database and via manual review of hospital clinical files.