The researchers have discovered the unusual form of type 1 diabetes in African individuals, challenging the conventional way of diagnosing and managing the prevalent disease.
Type 1 diabetes has always been associated with an autoimmune process in which the immune system produces so-called autoantibodies that attack the pancreas by mistake.
However, a new study involving 894 volunteers with young-onset diabetes in South Africa, Cameroon, and Uganda, found that 65 percent of individuals from African descent lacked the common autoantibodies typically seen in those people with type 1 diabetes in other parts of the world.
Surprisingly, these individuals neither possessed the genes that predispose to the disease nor the features consistent with type 2 diabetes and malnutrition-related diabetes.
The leading author of the study Dana Dabelea of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus explained: “This suggests that many young people in this region have a different form of type 1 diabetes altogether and is not autoimmune in origin.”
According to a report in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, The researches who conducted the similar kind of studies in the USA also reported that 15 percent of Black Americans grappling with type 1 diabetes, also exhibited the similar patterns like African patients, such as low genetic risk score and negative autoantibodies.
In contrast, white Americans showed the usual autoimmune pattern.
In the backdrop of astonishing findings, co-leader Professor Moffat Nyirenda of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Uganda Research Unit issued a statement, ‘These findings are a wake-up call. These findings challenge our assumptions about type 1 diabetes.”
He continued: “We urgently need to deepen our investigation into the biological and environmental factors driving this form of diabetes and ensure our diagnostic and treatment approaches are fit for purpose in African settings.”