Between the 1950s and 1980s, various studies reported the prevalence of diabetes with distinctive features in young people with a history of nutritional deficiency in low- and middle-income countries. The reports motivated the World Health Organization (WHO) to create the category “malnutrition-related diabetes mellitus.” But in 1999, the same agency removed it as an official category, based on what it said was a lack of evidence “that diabetes can be caused by malnutrition or protein deficiency per se.”
A clinical study published May 27 in Diabetes Care now argues that malnutrition-related diabetes mellitus is indeed a distinct type of diabetes, and that studying it as such may improve how it is treated. By studying a small sample of diabetic and healthy males from South India, the authors concluded that diabetic patients with a body mass index (BMI) of 19 kg/m2 or below with a history of malnutrition have a defect ...
