Improving people's lives

It is true that in the short term the treatments cure the acute symptoms. However, the human body maintains a delicate balance of nutrients and other substances, and the current treatments in many cases cannot exactly mimic the natural regulation, even if the visible symptoms disappear. Broadly speaking, diabetes can be defined as the inability to consume glucose for energy. Medication or insulin injections are enough to keep the cells going, but more often than not the patients have an abnormally high amount of sugar in their blood.

We still do not know exactly what happens next, but the end result for some patients is dire: within the first decades of diabetes their kidneys start to fail, their eyesight progressively deteriorates and they will most likely die prematurely from a heart attack. Additional medication exists to slow down or even halt the disease process, but medical and life style intervention cannot be started early enough due to the lack of knowledge of the exact biological mechanisms.

The Finnish Diabetic Nephropathy Study was founded to uncover the risk factors and mechanisms of the diabetic complications. We specialize in type 1 diabetes, where the body depletes its own capacity to use glucose via a deranged immune reaction, typically at a young age. We wish to improve the care for these patients by increasing the knowledge of the genes and environmental factors involved, and thus reduce the human and societal cost until a cure for diabetes itself - if ever found - is available.

Per-Henrik Groop
Principal investigator
The FinnDiane Study Group

nephropathy = kidney disease