No one knows why more adults are getting this kids' disease

Woman drinking water (iStock)

Robin Arzon, a Peloton Cycle spinning instructor and social-media maven, was 32 when she started to feel overwhelmingly thirsty all the time. She made a doctor’s appointment, and was floored when blood-work results came in a few days later: She had Type 1 diabetes.

“I was shocked,” she tells The Post. “It was something I wasn’t very familiar with at all. And I’m very healthy, so it certainly came as a surprise.”

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body stops producing insulin, which means it can’t break down sugar to use as energy. Up until the last decade, it was referred to as juvenile-onset diabetes — but it’s increasingly afflicting adults, according to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

“The number [of diagnoses] has been rising steadily over the last 20 years, but no one knows exactly why,” says Dr. Ronald Tamler, director of the Mount Sinai Clinical Diabetes Institute.

Unlike Type 2 diabetes, Type 1 is not caused by excess weight, but rather by a genetic predisposition triggered by environmental factors. New studies, including one published in April by a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a biomedical and genomic research center, point to poor gut health as a possible risk factor.

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