Insulin-dependent diabetes linked to five-gene combination

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Insulin-dependent diabetes has been linked to a combination of five genes that act in concert with each other, and people who inherit these combinations of genes are highly likely to develop the disease.

This discovery may enable scientists to determine who is at risk and who will be spared the complex disease that runs in families.

"It's very exciting news," said Ken Farber, executive director of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International in New York City in an interview with the New York Times.

The research that pinpointed the genes is part of an international effort by the Human Genome Project to identify all human genes. The method will be used for other diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, multiple sclerosis and asthmas, which also are inherited.

Diabetes type one, or the auto-immune disease found to destroy insulin-producing cells in the body, was the focus of the research. Patients who suffer from type one diabetes must give themselves daily insulin injections in order to survive.

Now that the genes have been isolated, genetic testing can be done to determine which people will get sick.

At Oxford University in England, researchers spent six years testing 300 families in which two children have insulin-dependent diabetes, but neither parent has the disease.

Information was collected by three different independent research groups. The working premise was, if two children have diabetes and neither parent does, then the children must have inherited the gene combination that allows the disease to materialize.

The next step of the process is to find out what the genes actually do and how the combinations leave people vulnerable to diabetes.

There are a number of experiments underway that scientists hope will lead to the prevention of the disease.