REGARDING THE TRIGGER OF THE BETA CELL AUTOIMMUNITY

Abstract

The final aim of diabetology, prevention of diabetes (in this discussion prevention of the autoimmune type 1 diabetes – T1D), finds us unprepared. This is because prevention cannot be done without a certain prediction while T1D prediction cannot be done without a good understanding of its pathogenesis. The main obstacle was represented by the limited (and only occasional) access to the study of the pancreas morphology, usually only once in a patient sometimes with an uncertain clinical phenotype, i.e. not very specific for T1D. The studies of the anti-β-cell autoimmunity performed on some animal models were hastily extrapolated to the pathogenesis of human.