Parental socio-economic position and the risk of type 1 diabetes in children and young adults in Denmark: A nation-wide register-based study

Abstract

Aim: Diabetes mellitus type 1 is one of the most common serious chronic diseases in childhood and the incidence is increasing. Insight into risk factors may inform our etiologic understanding of the disease and subsequent prevention. Any socio-economic gradient in disease risk indicates a potential for prevention, since this points towards socially patterned environmental risk factors. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between measures of parental socio-economic position and the onset of type 1 diabetes in offspring based on individual data in the entire Danish population. Methods: In a study population of all children born in Denmark between 1 January 1987 and 31 December 2010, we examined the association between parental socio-economic position and the risk of type 1 diabetes up to the age of 25 years. The risk of type 1 diabetes was estimated according to maternal education, paternal education and household income using Cox proportional hazards regression, with adjustments for the a priori selected confounding variables: year of birth, maternal age at birth and parental type 1 diabetes. Results: In the study population of 1,433,584 children, a total of 4610 developed type 1 diabetes. We found no clear pattern in type 1 diabetes risk according to parental educational attainment or parental household income. Conclusions: In this large population covering study of the risk of type 1 diabetes according to individual-level parental socio-economic position, we found no strong indication of a socially patterned disease risk.