Image via WikipediaI'm still puzzling over this article in the New York Times, "Some Diabetics Don't Have What They Thought They Had." The article seems to imply -- and some other news outlets have picked up -- that some children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM) actually have diabetes insipidus (DI). What the article means to imply, I think, is that some children with type 1 DM actually have maturity onset diabetes of the young (MODY). (I've looked, but I could not find a situation in which you'd ever confuse type 1 DM and DI. In DI, for example, you wouldn't have glucose in the urine.)Why is this important? Because if the myth propagates through the media that you can easily confuse DI and DM, countless younger adult patients with DM will approach their doctors demanding that they be tested for DI, which will require a lengthy explanation of how the two could not be confused...
On the other hand, I've seen patients with MODY misdiagnosed as having type 1 DM -- and they eventually are able to stop insulin and switch to oral therapy. This is the real message of the NYT article, I think, and it's great when it happens.
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