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Transcripts
DR. MAUSETH:
Now, what kind of disorder do
the patients with HUS have? We don't know. We
don't know what causes it. When we had the
outbreaks here, the large outbreak here in
Seattle, we drew blood on a lot of the patients,
sent them off for islet cell antibodies and the
antibodies were positive.
Now, that doesn't necessarily
mean they have type one diabetes but it means
that the body is reacting somehow to the islet
cells.
And then we started doing more
specific assays to look and to see whether it
was truly the classic type one diabetes or
genetic disorders and we couldn't find any
relationship at all.
Then that the original injury
gave us those positive studies -- that with the
original injury, the body decided that that was
foreign. The tissue was damaged and in
responding to the injury gave us the
antibodies rather than the antibodies actually
being the cause. So it's still really unclear
as to which -- what is the cause of diabetes in
these cases.
