The HLA system and diabetes mellitus.

There is a significant positive association between insulin dependent diabetes, irrespective of age of onset, and the HLA system, whereas there is no association of HLA antigens with non-insulin dependent diabetes. There is a significant concordance value for HLA antigen frequencies in insulin dependent diabetics from three different centres, indicating that the genes (s) conferring susceptibility to this type of diabetes is possibly present in all "juvenile-onset" diabetics and is in linkage disequilibrium with all the B locus alleles.