NPR

Researchers Try A Genetic Diabetes Test To Prevent Emergency Hospitalizations

Will a genetic test for Type 1 diabetes risk be valuable to parents, despite its shortcomings? Now many parents don't know their kids have this condition until they end up in the hospital.
Jeri Seidman and her daughter Hannah lounge at their home in Charlottesville, Va. Hannah is a patient in a genetic risk study about Type 1 diabetes.

Nearly half of all children who develop Type 1 diabetes don't know they have the disease until they end up in a coma in the hospital.

Researchers in Virginia have set out to see if a genetic test for Type 1 diabetes can eliminate many of those emergencies.

"The risk of Type 1 diabetes is about half genetic and half unknown," says Stephen Rich, director of the Center for Public Health Genomics at the University of Virginia. His team developed a test that can identify people who carry that genetic susceptibility.

Unlike most genetic conditions,

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