Immune response to insulin may predict onset of type 1 diabetes   

Researchers discover how they can identify people who are more at risk of developing type 1 diabetes. Read on to know more about this.

Type 1 diabetes is a condition where your immune system destroys the beta cells in your pancreas. These are the cells that are responsible for the production of the insulin hormone. This condition is also known as juvenile diabetes because it is mostly diagnosed in children and young adults. Symptoms include increased thirst, frequent urination, hunger, fatigue and blurred vision. This is an incurable condition and a doctor will try to mainly help you maintain normal blood sugar levels through regular monitoring, insulin therapy, diet and exercise. A patient will have to take insulin throughout his or her life.

Many people may be genetically predisposed to this condition, but everybody may not go on to develop type 1 diabetes. Experts have been unable to explain why this happens, Now, researchers from the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have found that immune responses to insulin could help identify individuals most at risk for developing Type 1 diabetes.

Identifying at-risk individuals

The study, out recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, measured immune responses from individuals genetically predisposed to developing Type 1 diabetes (T1D) to naturally occurring insulin and hybrid insulin peptides. Since not all genetically predisposed individuals develop type 1 diabetes, researchers sought to examine T-cell immune responses from the peripheral blood that could occur before the onset of clinical diabetes.

Understanding immune response against insulin producing cells

Researchers wanted to know why people develop type 1 diabetes, and this research has helped provide a lot more information and data as to what it looks like when genetically at-risk individuals are headed towards clinical diagnosis. Ideally, physicians would want to treat a disease when it's active. So it is important to understand when people have an immune response directed against insulin producing cells to treat type 1 diabetes.

For the purpose of the study, researchers collected blood samples from genetically at-risk adolescents every 6 months for two years. Inflammatory T-cell responses to hybrid insulin peptides correlated with worsening blood glucose measurements and progression to type 1 diabetes development. The results indicate an important advancement in identifying the risk of type 1 diabetes early as well as the potential for intervention.

Importance of immune intervention

Researchers say that there are now therapies used in research studies that have delayed the onset of clinical type 1 diabetes. Patients with these specific immune responses, may benefit from immune intervention to delay type 1 diabetes onset and possibly prevent it for years. This study may also have implications for other autoimmune diseases. Understanding how the immune system responds can be crucial in trying to prevent diseases before clinical symptoms are present.

(With inputs from Agencies)