VATIS UPDATE Article

An international team of researchers from University of London, the United Kingdom, Ulm University Medical Center, Germany and the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, a joint medical school of Imperial College London and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, investigating a form of adult-onset diabetes that shares features with the two better-known types of diabetes have discovered genetic influences that may offer clues to more accurate diagnosis and treatment.

Latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA) is informally called “type 1.5 diabetes” because like type 1 diabetes (T1D), LADA is marked by circulating autoantibodies, an indicator that an overactive immune system is damaging the body’s insulin-producing beta cells. But LADA also shares clinical features with type 2 diabetes (T2D), which tends to appear in adulthood. Also, as in T2D, LADA patients do not require insulin treatments when first diagnosed. The study uses genetic analysis to show that LADA is closer to T1D than to T2D.

The study team compared DNA from 978 LADA patients, all adults from the U.K. and Germany, to a control group of 1,057 children without diabetes. Another set of control samples came from 2,820 healthy adults in the U.K. All samples were from individuals of European ancestry. The researchers calculated genetic risk scores to measure whether LADA patients had genetic profiles more similar to those of T1D or T2D patients. They found several T1D genetic regions associated with LADA, while relatively few T2D gene regions added to the risk of LADA.