Kamila Vázquez was just 2 years old when she was diagnosed with diabetes. Her parents must now monitor her blood sugar levels and keep a close watch on what she eats, making simple things like birthday parties quite complex.
Kamila is one of the 150,000 people under 18 years old in America diagnosed with diabetes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but she is fortunate in many respects. She has two loving parents: her mother, Kamilla, and her father, who is All-Star White Sox [1] pitcher Javier Vázquez.
"The continuous monitoring of what she eats and her blood levels is an incredible job," Javier Vázquez says. "We rarely let her out of our sight."
Kamila's condition has inspired the Vázquez family to try and help the thousands of other families like theirs. The Javier Vázquez Foundation, which for three years has been assisting families with deaf children in the ballplayer’s native Puerto Rico, has taken on an additional mission: to help children with diabetes.
"Javier's life was changed when the diagnosis came," says Natalia Ferrer, executive director of the Javier Vázquez Foundation. "He understands that there are a lot of children that suffer from the same condition that aren't as lucky as her."
To help those children, the foundation recently threw a party to benefit diabetes research at Children's Memorial Hospital: the inaugural K's for Kids Gala. Many of Vázquez's teammates attended the event, which the White Sox have supported with time, money and donations of sports memorabilia for auction.
Kamila has Type 1 diabetes, a condition in which the immune system attacks the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, a hormone necessary to regulate sugar levels in the bloodstream. Type 1 is the leading form of diabetes in young people -- 13,000 new cases are diagnosed every year.
Type 2 diabetes accounts for the vast majority of diabetes cases overall, up to 95 percent, according to the National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse. Type 2 occurs when the body develops a resistance to using insulin, or the pancreas loses its ability to produce enough insulin to regulate blood sugar.
Historically, Type 2 diabetes occurred primarily in overweight adults over 40 years old, according to the National Diabetes Education [2] Program. But now, as more young people are becoming overweight and less active, it is turning up much more frequently among the young -- especially among blacks, American Indians, Latinos, and Asian and Pacific Islanders living in America.
"It's almost certainly a genetic predisposition", according to Dr. Donald Zimmerman, head of endocrinology at Children's Memorial Hospital, and professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Because of this predisposition, these ethnic communities are more susceptible to the negative effects of excessive weight gain, according to Zimmerman.
In Chicago, childhood obesity rates are far higher than the national average, especially in Latino and black neighborhoods like Humboldt Park and North and South Lawndale. Sixty percent of children in Humboldt Park between the ages of 2 and 12 are obese, according to the Sinai Urban Health Institute, compared with the national rate of 33 percent. Humboldt Park is a largely Latino community.
Type 1 diabetes affects 1 in 1,000 children in Chicago, but the incidence rate of Type 2 diabetes among children is still unknown, according to Zimmerman. "The one thing we do know is that the incidence is dramatically increasing," he says.