Research

The National Institute of Health USA grants Apodemus over SEK two million for diabetes research.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has granted Apodemus AB and a research group in California over SEK two million for research on diabetes. The research will focus on findings of concurrence between diabetes and other autoimmune diseases and evaluate evidence suggesting a common etiology. The research is made possible by the unique Swedish patient data bases as well as information from environmental surveillance.

 Preliminary results from Apodemus research show that diabetes is associated with several autoimmune diseases. The scientists believe that diabetes and these other autoimmune diseases may be caused by a related environmental factor – most likely an infectious agent – a virus.

 The NIH support means that these studies will continue. The study will include the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare unique patient data base and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency surveillance data files. By linking patient data, where patient identity has been removed, with environmental data such as abundance of small rodents, patterns of association can be detected. Small rodents are of special interest since they are the reservoir of the Ljungan virus, a virus causing diabetes in these animals in the wild.

 Apodemus has during many years investigated the role of the Ljungan Virus in causing diseases, among them diabetes in both humans and animals.

 The research group consists of Dr William Klitz, School of Public Health, expert on genetic factors and disease, Dr Bo Niklasson, research director at Apodemus AB and expert on diseases transmitted from animals to humans, and system specialist Stefan Lindström, who has developed a programme to run the various files concurrently.

 One important reason for the US financial support is the unique Swedish data bases. From the National Board of Health and Welfare patient data base you can extract information on diseases and their age, sex, temporal and geographical distribution. Sweden also has several unique diabetes data bases. In addition the Environmental Protection Agency surveillance programme has collected data on small rodents density since the beginning of the 1970s.  This database is also quite unique in the world and provides a tool for researchers to see whether diseases in humans co-vary in time with the number of rodents, indicating that the rodents may carry a pathogen causing the disease in humans.

 The suggested research programme will run several sets of data in parallel and look for associations. The goal is to generate ideas. The computer analysis will not provide a specific answer on what diseases that have common etiology, nor if the etiology is an environmental factor such as a virus. However, the analysis may generate data suggesting common etiology and it may also suggest that the etiology could be a zoonotic agent. The generated hypothesis must then be proved by other techniques and methods.

 The need to utilize large data bases points at a weakness in today’s health care. The result of modern highly specialized medical care is that a patient with more than one disease is most often treated by several experts who rarely communicate with each other. Because of this lack of communication, the association between different diseases that could contribute to our understanding of their origin is often missed. The system also lacks continuity because few patients see the same doctor in different stages in their life with different diseases. One of the consequences is that very few doctors have the overview that doctors had 150 years ago. We have fantastic diagnostic tools but we lack overview and perspective. The suggested project using Sweden’s unique data bases may to some extent compensate for this.