This caught my attention because I work in a diabetes lab, and
because a colleague of ours died of insulin shock last week (less
rare than people think, sadly).
First, one quick correction on the article - there's quite a lot of
research to show that type 1 diabetes actually develops over quite
a long period; antibodies indicating the presence of an autoimmune
response can be detected months or even years before onset of
clinical symptoms. We've actually used this knowledge to screen
family members for antibodies so that we can conduct studies in
people at-risk for type 1 diabetes who still have relatively normal
pancreas function.
To the person who was wondering about type 1 diabetes at 51, look
up 'Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults' (LADA) - it's a form of
type 1 diabetes where the autoimmune response progresses very
slowly, and seems to have some features of type 2 diabetes, such as
insulin resistance and obesity. These people often have a small
number of the risk genes for type 1 diabetes; the more you have,
the earlier you are likely to get it. They also sometimes have T2D
genes as well.
Some research by S Fourlanos et al indicates that even in classic
type 1 diabetes, insulin resistance is a risk factor - and I
believe other researcher are now finding evidence of autoimmunity
in people who have had T2D for a long time. So the two diseases may
be more closely related than we had thought.
Catherine, not a scientist, but plays one on TV (or rather, is
helping administer a clinical trial and has typed up far too many
papers on this subject for it not to have sunk in)
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