Jo’s Cafe

Research keeps finding more and more.  One day this condition will go the way of Small Pox.  God Willing.

Researchers have uncovered a fourth antibody that can better predict who is at risk for type 1 diabetes.

Type-1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease and affects only about 5 percent of the diabetic population in the United States. About 95 percent of people with diabetes have type-2 diabetes, which is a metabolic disorder (rather than an autoimmune disease).

In type-1 diabetes, the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks and kills insulin-producing cells. Currently, doctors can measure three antibodies in the blood to diagnose diabetes before its onset — providing a 90-percent chance of accurately predicting the disease. But researchers from the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes and the University of Colorado at Denver have discovered a fourth antibody, called ZnT8, that can up the prediction rate to 96 percent.

John Hutton, Ph.D., from the Barbara Davis Center, was quoted as saying, “This is incredibly exciting for us since this new target is the first to be discovered in 10 years. ZnT8 shows great value as a diagnostic tool and we believe testing for it will very quickly become routine in all of the ongoing clinical research studies. For example, this fourth autoantigen will find immediate use in identifying individuals with a family history of diabetes or a genetic predisposition to the disease for recruitment into clinical trials aimed at preventing diabetes.”

via MyDiabetesCentral.com