Question: What is the difference between the diabetes children get and that suffered by oldies ?
There are two very distinct types of diabetes—juvenile (type one) diabetes and maturity onset (type 2) diabetes. The juvenile form may develop at any time from birth to the thirties, but the most common is between 10 and 20 years of age. Maturity type can start at any time from the thirties onwards, particularly in obese people, but is more common over 60. Juvenile diabetes is more severe and harder to control. It almost invariably requires injections of insulin once or twice a day for the rest of the patient’s life, as well as a strict diet.
In the mature form, diet and weight loss alone are often sufficient to control the problem, but some sufferers require tablets to be taken regularly, and a small number need insulin injections.
Diabetes is caused by either the failure of the pancreas gland in the center of the abdomen to produce insulin, or a reduced sensitivity of the cells in the body to insulin. The former tends to be the cause in the juvenile form, and the latter in the mature.
Insulin is essential for cells to take sugar out of the blood and into the cell, and without it, excess amounts of sugar build up in the blood and the cells are starved of a vital energy source.

Question: I have a bad family history of late onset diabetes. How can this be detected? Would a routine blood test for cholesterol find it? Are there any lifestyle changes I can make to prevent it? What are the early symptoms?
Late onset (type 2, or maturity onset) diabetes is a totally different disease to juvenile (type 1) diabetes. The former can be controlled by diet and tablets, while the latter requires regular insulin injections. There is a family tendency to develop type 2 diabetes, but it is not inevitable that you will develop it just because close relatives have the condition.
Diabetes is diagnosed by a simple blood test for the presence of excess sugar, but a test for cholesterol will not reveal the presence of sugar and diabetes.
You can delay, or prevent the onset of this form of diabetes by reducing the amount of sugar and fat in your diet, and by keeping your weight within normal limits.
The early symptoms are excessive thirst, passing more urine than usual, tiredness, blurred vision and frequent skin infections. If you are concerned that you may develop type 2 diabetes in the near future, your general practitioner can arrange for a glucose tolerance test (GTT) to be performed by a pathology laboratory. This test takes a couple of hours to perform, and can tell more accurately if you have diabetes, and sometimes it can predict if you are likely to develop the condition in the near future.