The study findings could lead to more personalized diabetes treatments. (Halfpoint Images/Moment/Getty Images)
Identifying distinctive types of conditions like diabetes is helpful in two ways. It means treatments can be personalized more precisely to individuals, and gives researchers a better idea of how to make those treatments more effective going forward.When it comes to type 1 diabetes, there are two genetic patterns called HLA-DR3 and HLA-DR4 that are associated with a higher risk of the disease. However, while the end result is the same (type 1 diabetes), the early signs differ between the two patterns.To investigate further, researchers from the US and UK ran the first-ever genome-wide association study (GWAS) separating type 1 diabetes patients by these two genetic signatures (technically known as haplotypes).The purpose of a GWAS is to find areas of DNA potentially linked to a disease, and there were enough genetic differences between HLA-DR3 and HLA-DR4 participants in a sample of 9,091 people with type 1 diabetes and 14,157 controls to suggest we may be looking at two distinct subtypes.The results have been published in Diabetologia.A GWAS (like this for kidney stone disease) associates specific genes with specific diseases. (Howles et al., Nat. Commun., 2019/CC BY 4.0) "Type 1 diabetes is a complex disease characterized by autoimmune destruction of beta cells, but the underlying etiology is not well understood," write the researchers in their published paper."The timing of progression to clinical diabetes varies widely across individuals, ranging from very early in childhood to adult onset."While the HLA-DR3 and HLA-DR4 genetic profiles and early signs had hinted at two types of type 1 diabetes, the new findings point to different biological machinery and mechanisms being involved as well.
