New form of type 1 diabetes identified in black patients
In type 1 diabetes, the insulin-producing Beta cells in the pancreas stop working in childhood or young adulthood. The disease has always been attributed to an autoimmune process in which the immune system produces so-called autoantibodies that mistakenly attack the pancreas.
But studying 894 volunteers in Cameroon, Uganda and South Africa with youth-onset diabetes, researchers found that 65% of them did not have the usual autoantibodies typically seen in people with type 1 diabetes in other parts of the world. Nor did they have the genes that usually predispose to the disease, or features consistent with other known types of diabetes, such as type 2 and malnutrition-related diabetes.
'This suggests that many young people in this region have a different form of type 1 diabetes altogether and it is not autoimmune in origin,' study leader Dana Dabelea of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus said.
Comparing the data to studies in the US, the researchers found that 15% of black Americans diagnosed with type 1 diabetes had a form of the disease similar to the patients in Sub-Saharan Africa, characterised by negative autoantibodies and a low genetic risk score, according to a report in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology.
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