Children aged between 4 and 7 months can participate in the POInT study to help prevent type 1 diabetes.
At the beginning of the study, you and your child will be invited to regular examinations at intervals of 2 to 4 months until your daughter or son is 18 months old. Your child will then be assessed every 6 months until he or she is 3 years old.
During this time, the study participants are given the contents of a capsule each day to eat with food (e.g. stirred into baby food, yoghurt or milk). Half of the participants are given insulin powder, and the other half are given a placebo (an inactive substance).
It is a double-​blind study, which means that neither the study participants nor the doctors know which capsules contain insulin and which contain the placebo.

The treatment finishes when your child turns 3 years of age. After that, our doctors will carry out further physical examinations and blood tests every 6 months. The longest possible follow-​up period is until your child reaches 7.5 years old.

POInT is the acronym for Primary Oral Insulin Trial. This study tries to train the immune system and prevent type 1 diabetes in children with an increased risk of the disease. Children between the age of 4-7 months and 3 years will consume a small amount of insulin powder with food daily. We are hoping their immune systems will become accustomed to insulin, so that it will not attack insulin-​producing cells, thus averting the development of type 1 diabetes.

We have evidence from previous studies that such training can be successful. However, there is no guarantee that this procedure will work for diabetes.

First promising results that such training with insulin powder can succeed were found in a preliminary study, the Pre-​POINT study (JAMA 2015; 313(15):1-10. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.2928). Further evidence that the basic concept of immune training can work in early childhood is provided by allergy research. In the recently published LEAP study, children who had been eating peanuts until the age of 5 were significantly less likely to develop peanut allergies than those who avoided peanut consumption. (Du Toit G et al., N Engl J Med 2015).