BY MEGAN ROGERS

In the UK alone, almost 400,000 people are affected by type 1 diabetes and more than 29,000 of them are children; but do many people know what it entails?

Type 1 isn’t caused by a poor diet or unhealthy lifestyle. In fact, it isn’t caused by anything that someone did or didn’t do and there is nothing that can be done to prevent it.

Type 1 diabetes is also known as childhood diabetes as it usually impacts on children and young adults.

This illness is an autoimmune disease. When unwell, a person’s immune system will work to fight of the virus - but sometimes it will instead attack healthy body tissue by mistake.

In this case, the body attacks the cells in your pancreas, which then stops the production of insulin.

Insulin is crucial to life. It moves energy from food - called glucose - into your blood.

Without insulin, the glucose builds up in your blood making it thick so it’s harder for it to flow, meaning your body is unable to function properly. Over time, this can cause irreversible damage and even death.

Some people our age might worry about eating and gaining weight, losing their phone or whether their day will be good.

But for a diabetic, worries include not eating and going into hypoglycaemia, which is potentially fatal, losing their monitor and not being able to deliver insulin, or maybe just not knowing how much insulin to give depending on what lessons they have or whether they’re going to out with friends.