News & Research
Diabetic Ketoacidosis Linked to Memory Deficits
Children with type 1 diabetes who have a history of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) have significantly worse memory for item-context associations than children with type 1 diabetes who have not had DKA.
The researchers tested the memories of 33 children who had experienced DKA and 29 children with diabetes who had not. The DKA group had lower rates of accurate memory on an event-color association task and an event-spatial position, with children who experienced DKA before seven years of age showing the greatest memory deficits. For children who had only one DKA episode, a greater length of time since the episode was associated with worse task performance.
According to lead author Dr. Simona Ghetti of the University of California, Davis, this association suggests that there may be times when the brain is more vulnerable to such injury and times when intervention against memory deficits is most effective.
Nearly three-quarters of the children in the DKA group had their DKA recorded at the time of diagnosis, with 90 percent having only a single episode. "Thus, the majority of DKA episodes did not appear to be caused by inadequate understanding of diabetes management," the authors wrote in the Journal of Pediatrics.
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The information contained in this article does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the American Diabetes Association.
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