Diabetes researchers have called for a rethink on type 1 diabetes, arguing for it to be redefined as an asymptomatic autoimmune disease that eventually leads to beta-cell destruction.

Moving away from viewing it as a metabolic disorder at the end stage of disease is a key step in prevention, they write in the Medical Journal of Australia.

By then, it is too late to prevent progression to insulin therapy, but with improved screening, it could be detected sooner, they say.

“Clinical diagnosis is the end stage of subclinical pathology over months to years, during which time beta cells in the islets of the pancreas undergo autoimmune destruction,” write Professor Jenny Couper, from the University of Adelaide, and Professor Leonard Harrison, from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne.