What is Autoimmune Diabetes? Autoimmune Diabetes is Type 1 diabetes. It is an autoimmune disease. T1D, once known as juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes that prevents your pancreas from making insulin. Insulin is an important hormone that regulates the amount of sugar in your blood. If you don’t have enough insulin, too much sugar builds up in your blood, causing hyperglycemia (high blood sugar), and your body can’t use the food you eat for energy. The body that mistakenly destroys the insulin-producing cells, or beta cells and occurs in genetically predisposed individuals. At the time of diagnosis, only 10 to 20% of the insulin-producing beta cells continue to function.
Anyone at any age can develop Type 1 diabetes (T1D) but thr common age at diagnosis is between the ages of 4 to 6 and between10 to 14 years. There is Latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA) is a type of diabetes that starts in adulthood. It is sometimes called type 1.5. Symptoms usually start around 30 or older.
Type 1 diabetes is relatively common. In the United States, approximately 1.24 million people live with Type 1 diabetes.
What causes the initial fault in the immune system is yet to be discovered, however, research suggests that the condition results from a combination of genetic predisposition with an environmental trigger.
What is Autoimmune Diabetes?
Because type 1 diabetes causes the loss of insulin production, it therefore requires regular insulin administration either by injection or by insulin pump.
Type 1 diabetes symptoms should be acted upon immediately, as without treatment this type of diabetes can be deadly. Symptoms include above average thirst, tiredness during the day, need to urinate more frequently, unexplained weight loss, and genital itchiness.
To date, Teplizumab, also called hOKT3γl, a FcR-non-binding, and otelixizumab (chAglyCD3), an aglycosylated FcR non-binding CD3-specific Ab, were tested in clinical trials on patients with recent-onset T1D. They demonstrated significantly reduced side-effects [73, 74].
See the below links for more information on this new drug.
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/fda-approves-first-drug-that-delays-onset-of-type-1-diabetes/
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/teplizumab-new-diabetes-drug
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23403703/
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