Diabetes and the Amplifier Hypothesis

This week's report by Rosenbloom on the occurrence of "chemical" diabetes in children is important because of its optimistic implications. If juvenile diabetes were fundamentally different from the maturity-onset type and characterized from the start by the sudden disappearance of insulin secretory capacity there might be some justification for routine acceptance of the conventional therapeutic approach. Rosenbloom's observations, however, confirm scattered earlier reports to indicate that children in whom clinical disease is destined to develop pass through a phase of nearly asymptomatic but nonetheless, by modern laboratory technics, easily detected preclinical diabetes. At this point treatment with oral antidiabetic agents . . .