Screening for islet autoantibodies in children with a first-degree family history of type 1 diabetes reduces their risk of going on to develop diabetic ketoacidosis, research shows.
At diabetes onset, those children who had been identified as islet autoantibody positive through screening had a lower HbA1c (8.6% vs 11%) than patients who had not been screened, German researchers found.
Screened children also had a lower prevalence of diabetic ketoacidosis (3% vs 29%), and a shorter hospitalisation period (1 vs 15 days), according to the study of more than 50,000 children with type 1 diabetes – 101 of whom had been screened and tested islet autoantibody positive.
These findings were consistent when the comparison was restricted to 759 non-screened children with a first-degree family...
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