Beyond 'I'm a Diabetic,' Little Common Ground
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

...As volunteers for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, they collect far more money per patient for Type 1 diabetics than older and larger organizations that fight diseases with many, many more cases.

Among the illnesses that have been outpaced is a major disease, now epidemic in proportions, with a similar name: Type 2 diabetes.

Type 2, which most often affects the old and overweight, now afflicts some 20 million Americans and is the nation's fastest growing health problem. But it draws little more research money than Type 1, a malfunction of the immune system that affects one million people in the United States.

Even public health authorities who try to avoid viewing one disease in the context of another acknowledge that it is hard not to notice the outsize fund-raising success of Type 1 in contrast with Type 2.

It is among the many points of distinction between two groups who share the label diabetic and the risks that arise from having elevated sugar in their blood — though not much else.

Most Type 1 diabetics develop the disease as children, without warning, on the basis of genetic factors. They are quite often thin. They come from all walks of life, neighborhoods and ethnicities.

Their chief advocates are parents of children with Type 1, a group that includes skilled, upper-income professionals devoted to finding a long-sought cure, which many think is approaching.

People with Type 2, on the other hand, are far more likely to be old and poor, overweight and not white, although this disease also stems, in part, from genetic factors. The risk increases with age. Because their disease is associated with eating and inactivity, they routinely encounter less sympathy. Often they are stigmatized as undisciplined.

As a group, Type 2 diabetics tend to be less organized and less forceful in advocating for themselves. They cannot argue as convincingly that more money might produce a medical cure anytime soon.

Yet the number of Type 2 diabetics is so large, and growing so rapidly, that Type 1 parents often say they fear that their children's plight is being lost in the din of the larger problem with the similar name. They often bristle when their children are mistaken for Type 2 diabetics, fearful that their children, and their own fund-raising efforts, are being muddied by the stigma that clings to the other disease.

More than three decades ago, these concerns helped convince the parents of people with Type 1 to create their own organization, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, dedicated solely to curing that disease. Many people with Type 1 now raise money for the foundation, not for the American Diabetes Association, with which they were once affiliated.