TUESDAY, June 2, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- Population-based screening for early-stage type 1 diabetes identifies most children who progress to clinical type 1 diabetes, with additional cases detected with repeat screening, according to a study published online May 21 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Christiane Winkler, Ph.D., from the German Research Center for Environmental Health in Munich, and colleagues estimated early-stage (stage 1 or 2) type 1 diabetes prevalence and disease progression to clinical (stage 3) type 1 diabetes in a population-based screening study involving 220,476 children. Screening was conducted once in children aged 1.75 to 5.99 years until March 2019 and was then expanded to up to two screenings in children aged 1.75 to 10.99 years.
Overall, 590 children had presymptomatic early-stage type 1 diabetes at first screening (adjusted population frequency, 0.3 percent; prevalence, 0.23 and 0.06 percent for stage I and stage II type 1 diabetes, respectively). The researchers identified 29 additional cases in repeat screening in 11,726 children after a median of 3.3 years. Overall, stage 3 diabetes developed in 212 children with an early-stage diagnosis at first screening, five with a diagnosis at rescreening, and 43 without early-stage diagnosis during a median follow-up of 5.7 years. The five-year progression from early-stage to clinical diabetes was 36.2 percent, with no significant difference for children with and without first-degree family history.
"These data show that screening in the general population makes sense," Winkler said in a statement. "If we only test children with a family history of type 1 diabetes, we miss the majority of children who later develop stage 3 type 1 diabetes."
Several authors disclosed ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
