Natural History of Type 1 Diabetes

Abstract

Type 1 diabetes is a chronic autoimmune disease occurring in genetically predisposed individuals. Much interest has focused on the identification of susceptibility and protective genes. Genome-wide linkage analyses using the Type 1 diabetes, Genetics Consortium and three other datasets have confirmed that approximately 40% of the familial aggregation of type 1 diabetes can be attributed to allelic variation of HLA loci in the major histocompatibility locus on chromosome 6p21 (1  ). Also, INS (chromosome 11p15), CTLA4 (chromosome 2q33), and PTPN22 (chromosome 1p13) have clearly been demonstrated as susceptibility loci and nine further non-HLA linked regions show linkage with type 1 diabetes (..