Clinical and Genetic Heterogeneity of Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults

Abstract

We read with interest the comments of Fukui et al. (1) in this issue of Diabetes Care regarding our recent article (2). They claim that patients with latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA) are heterogeneous in their clinical attributes and that the LADA patients in our study represented the LADA type 1 subgroup. Because of this, we observed that their clinical and genetic characteristics resembled patients having rapidly progressive adult-onset type 1 diabetes. We agree that LADA patients may show heterogeneous clinical features, but we feel that our patients with LADA are representative of the whole LADA group: 25% of our LADA patients belonged to the overweight category based on their BMI, and the same percentage of patients had lipid abnormalities. The median of the insulin-free period after the diagnosis of diabetes was 3.0 years (1.0–6.0), despite the fact that we initiated insulin therapy in 23 of our …