As more and more people become ill with type 2 diabetes (90 percent of cases) or even are born already diabetic , a study appeared in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology and conducted by the Swedish Lund University Diabetes Center in association with the Finnish Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland raises another alarm: the types of diabetes would not be two as is commonly thought, but five.

If in general the diagnosis of type 1 or 2 diabetes passes from the search for specific antigens (which destroy pancreatic cells) for which the person presenting the antigens has type 1 diabetes, who has diabetes hyperglycemia without the effects of a autoimmune disease has type 2 diabetes, researchers have realized that apart from this distinction, the classification of types of diabetes has been the same for over twenty years , despite the differences found between the various forms of diabetes according to the scientific community , differences that should reclassify diabetes not into two but into five types.

To determine these differences, the researchers analyzed a sample of more than 14,000 diabetic people in Northern Europe, discovering that there are 5 types of diabetes. That is type 1 diabetes , of autoimmune origin, and 4 different types of non-autoimmune or type 2 diabetes that the researchers discovered by examining different variables, such as body mass index, the age at which the disease, glycated hemoglobin , beta cell functioning .

The 4 different types of diabetes now included in type 2 would be:
– Juvenile diabetes: insulin deficiency, young age, metabolic problems. It concerns 9-20% of the sample.
– “renal” diabetes:severe insulin resistance and a high risk of kidney problems. It concerns 11/17% of the sample
– diabetes related to overweight: it is a diabetes that is found in obese people. It concerns 18/23% of the sample.
– diabetes in old age: typical of elderly people, it concerns 39/47% of the sample.
The researchers found that insulin therapy was proposed only in the first and in the second case partially, and this suggests that in the other cases diabetes is not treated as it should, i.e. with more targeted interventions . The differences between these types of diabetes require personalized therapies, said Professor Leil Goop, head of the research.