Published on
Updated
Reading 2 mins.
On the set of C à Vous on France 5, Thursday April 13, the writer Frédéric Beigbeder spoke about the discovery of his diabetes, which he attributes to a traumatic event. But can stress cause type 1 diabetes? We asked the question to Pr Boris Hansel, diabetologist endocrinologist, at the Bichat hospital.
Guest on the set of It’s up to you for the promotion of his new book Confessions of a Slightly Overwhelmed Heterosexual, Frédéric Beigbeder did not speak only of literature. In a discussion about his career, but also his health, the 57-year-old man also spoke about a condition that is little known to him: his type 1 diabetes.
Diabetes discovered after armed robbery
Unvarnished, the writer opened up about the shock of this news which gave a new direction to his life:
“You have the ambition to grow old, even though you say you lost eleven years of life expectancy in one morning, in one exam. The day your blood test revealed your type 1 diabetes.”
As for the question of the cause of this disease, Frédéric Beigbeder evokes a possible link with an episode in his life: “It seems that sometimes you can trigger pre-existing diabetes, after stress. I was caught in an armed attack…”.
Indeed, as Inserm indicates on its site, type 1 diabetes (T1D) is caused by the dysfunction of T lymphocytes (cells of the immune system) which begin to identify the ß cells of the pancreas as cells foreign to the patient’s body, and to eliminate them. Is the theory of an external factor capable of upsetting the immune system and therefore of playing on T1D credible?
Stress, an indicator of type 1 diabetes?
But can stress itself cause this type 1 diabetes from which the writer suffers? We asked the question to Professor Boris Hansel, diabetologist endocrinologist, at Bichat Hospital.
“Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, a reaction of the body against itself with the production of antibodies that attack the pancreas. However, we know that autoimmune processes can be accelerated by psychological stress. This is the case in other inflammatory autoimmune diseases, such as arthritis or psoriasis, which will worsen at times. So there is an accelerating effect in stress” reveals the teacher.
However, it is difficult to know if the stress will reveal type 1 diabetes which would have appeared anyway or if it will accelerate a predisposition which would not necessarily have led to the disease without this fact…
“What we cannot say, however, is whether this person would have had this type 1 diabetes in his life anyway, and whether the stress is a revealer or an accelerator. It is impossible to determine. We can think that there are people who would not have declared the disease, because it takes time, before their own death. And others who have latent type 1 diabetes, which would have revealed itself sooner or later, and which is triggered even earlier in the face of stress. “
Stress can therefore promote the revelation or acceleration of an autoimmune disease. But it is not the only factor. “Other factors may also be involved, such as infection by a virus, exposure to an endocrine disruptor, or even pollution…” concludes the diabetologist.