Diabetes Cure Story
The process of developing diabetes is gradual. Studies performed by the Joslin Clinic have shown changes as much as nine years before the actual presentation of diabetes symptoms. The development of Type 1 diabetes can be broken down into five stages:
- Genetic predisposition
- Environmental trigger
- Active autoimmunity
- Progressive beta-cell destruction
- Presentation of the symptoms of Type 1 diabetes
People with Type 1 diabetes have a genetic pre-disposition to the disease, but one or more environmental insults is required to trigger disease. This fact can be derived from studies of identical twins with Type 1 diabetes. When one twin has Type 1 diabetes, the other twin gets diabetes only half the time. If the cause of Type 1 diabetes were purely genetic, both identical twins would always have Type 1 diabetes.
One environmental trigger is thought to be the Coxsackie B virus. Researchers at UCLA found that a small segment of GAD is structurally similar to a segment of a Coxsackie B protein. GAD is found on the surface of insulin-producing beta cells. The implication is that the body's immune system, after warding off the Coxsackie B virus, continues to attack beta cells because of the similarity of GAD to the virus.
