The controversial link between drinking cows' milk during infancy and the risk of developing diabetes may have been strengthened by a new study that finds that exposure early in life to cow's milk may increase the lifetime risk of developing diabetes in high risk children.

In children diagnosed at a young age with diabetes, insulin autoantibodies are particularly present and are believed by some researchers to be the primary event in the process leading to type 1 diabetes.

Exposure to cows' milk has previously been shown to cause the body to mount an immune response to insulin in some children and may precipitate the development of these autoantibodies, but the …