September 26, 2004
LADA and MODY
Question from Pinckney, Michigan, USA:
My oldest daughter, 17, was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes when she was 13 years old. I have been diagnosed with insulin resistance. My father has had type 2 diabetes for decades. My youngest daughter, now 10, had some high blood sugars a year ago. Her A1cs were fine and, after monitoring her blood sugar for a while, her doctor was not concerned. She also has kidney disease and anomalies. Recently, her nephrologist suggested that my youngest daughter has something called Glomerulocystic Kidney Disease which involved MODY5 diabetes. He wants her to see an endocrinologist and a genetic specialist to look for a HNF1-beta gene. My nephew, as well as my uncle and cousin, all have similar kidney anomalies as my daughter. Do you have any information on MODY5? I have searched the Internet and there is very little to no information. Does this mean that my youngest daughter also has type 2 diabetes? Would this mean that my oldest daughter and I have MODY5 as well? Is the treatment the same as type 2 diabetes?
Answer:
MODY is a rare kind of type 2 diabetes in children. There is some new genetic diagnostic information recently available and I suspect this is what has been suggested. You should discuss this with your diabetologist in some detail since they can provide you some more specific information about how to proceed. If you go to the PubMed web site of the NIH and type in MODY, you will find hundreds of scientific articles and some that will be reviews of current information. You can then visit that particular journal and pay for a copy of the article if it is not a free service; or, you can have your local librarian obtain it for a small fee as well. Nonscientific discussions of MODY will be quite limited, unfortunately. If you have access to a medical school library, many of the formal diabetes textbooks of recent years will also have elegant summary chapters about MODY. One such is Diabetes Mellitus: A Fundamental and Clinical Text.
SB
