ABSTRACT
I. INTRODUCTION Type 1 diabetes is often thought of as a disease of children, but the majority of cases present in adult life. The condition is less well characterized in older patients due to overlap with other forms of diabetes and dilution of some of its most distinctive clinical features. The major limiting factor in the study of autoimmune diabetes in humans has been the inaccessibility of its target organ, the pancreatic cells, and relatively little is known about the histopathology of the condition. To some extent this limitation has been remedied by investigation of the main animal model of autoimmune diabetes, the nonobese diabetic (NOD) mouse [1]. It should, however, be noted that standard descriptions often extrapolate information available only in the mouse to humans; this chapter will focus on evidence concerning the human form of the disease.
