For more than ten years some insulin is still produced in almost half of the patients who have type 1 diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes, a chronic disease mainly debuting during childhood or adolescence, has previously been considered to result in full loss of the patients'' insulin production. However, by the use of sophisticated insulin assays that has been introduced in recent years, this has now been shown not to be true in all cases.
It is still not known if the patients had higher levels of interleukin-35 already at debut of disease, or if the levels had increased over the years with ceased immune attack towards the insulin producing cells as result.
A previous study by the same research group has shown that both patients newly diagnosed for type 1 diabetes and patients with long-standing disease have in average lower levels of interleukin-35 when compared to healthy individuals.
Reference
- Daniel Espes et al., Increased Interleukin-35 Levels in Patients With Type 1 Diabetes With Remaining C-Peptide, Diabetes CareRead More