Lance Bass Misdiagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes - He really has Type 1.5

Common misconceptions about diabetes and age

Unfortunately, Lance's doctor never questioned the diagnosis despite his healthy weight and lifestyle habits. Lance’s body weight alone should’ve triggered the doctor to do a bit more investigating before confirming a diagnosis.

“I’m healthy, I work out, I eat right,” Lance told Yahoo! Life. “There’s no way I’m diabetic.”

“When I was first diagnosed, I had a difficult time getting my glucose levels under control,” Lance shared on his TikTok, “...even though I made adjustments to my diet, my medications, and my workout routine. Things were just not adding up.”

Like most adults who’ve been misdiagnosed, Lance was trying to manage his blood sugars with instructions for a person with type 2 diabetes. Of course, it wasn’t working.

“I was so frustrated, and it really was affecting me because I felt like I was really sick, and I could not figure this out,” recalled Lance, who was likely experiencing the symptoms of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA). 

“I felt like something was wrong with me.”

If his doctor had performed a few simple blood tests at the time of his first diagnosis, he could’ve saved Lance from several years of increasingly high blood sugar levels, frustration, and feeling so ill.

Is it type 1 or type 2 diabetes?

Fortunately, Lance didn’t give up and finally got the right diagnosis.

“I recently discovered that I was misdiagnosed! I actually have type 1.5, also known as LADA or Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults,” explained Lance on his TikTok. “It has been quite the journey.”

Different Types of Diabetes

LADA is a subtype of type 1 diabetes — it simply means the person’s insulin production is going to decline significantly slower than someone with traditional type 1 diabetes. LADA is more common in adults over 30 years old. 

LADA/Type 1.5

LADA/Type 1: In both LADA and traditional type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks and destroys the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. This results in high blood sugar levels, autoantibodies, and ketones.

Type 2 Diabetes (T2D)

Type 2: In type 2 diabetes, the pancreas struggles to produce enough insulin to meet the body’s needs, resulting in high blood sugar levels. Only on rare occasions do people with type 2 diabetes develop ketones or autoantibodies.

Testing for Type 1 Diabetes

Here are the additional diabetes tests Lance’s doctor should’ve ordered to get an accurate diabetes diagnosis:

• C-peptide level: C-peptide tells you how much insulin you’re producing. In type 1 diabetes, this number will be very low. In type 2 diabetes, it’s usually very high.
• Autoantibodies: A variety of autoantibodies develop when the immune system starts attacking and destroying the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. Autoantibodies are a clear sign of type 1 diabetes.

In the near future, Type 1 Strong’s DNA Test Kit will also eliminate this increasing rate of diabetes misdiagnosis! Using DNA to identify which type of diabetes you actually have means you can prevent months or years of struggling to manage type 2 when you actually have type 1.

So, did COVID-19 cause Lance’s type 1 diabetes?

In short, not really. Instead, Lance was likely in the earlier stages of developing type 1 for many years, and the stress of COVID-19 (or any illness) triggered the full onset of the disease. 

In other words, his immune system was already attacking his pancreas, but the stress of COVID-19 caused it to attack those insulin-producing cells even harder and faster! 

Shout-out to Lance

Hey, Lance! We’ll support you no matter what type of diabetes you have, but welcome to the T1D club! It isn’t easy, but with daily persistence, lots of education, and enough insulin, you can live a big life with type 1 diabetes.