Am I Misdiagnosed as Type 2?

This is the question that brings most people to LADA, and it deserves a straight answer: the pattern below is a reason to ask for testing, not a diagnosis in itself.

The features that should raise the question are:

• You are lean or normal weight, rather than carrying weight around the middle.
• Your blood pressure and blood fats are normal, so the usual Type 2 cluster is missing.
• You or your family have an autoimmune condition, such as thyroid disease or coeliac disease.
• Your control is slipping despite doses being increased, and you are taking your tablets as prescribed.
• You are losing weight without meaning to.

The delay is often long. In a case series from western India, LADA was recognised a median of 5.5 years after diabetes was first found — years spent on tablets that were never going to hold.

Now the honest caveat. The largest study on this compared thousands of adults with and without islet antibodies and concluded that, apart from the antibodies themselves, there was no clinical feature that reliably separated the two groups. Plenty of people with LADA are overweight. Plenty of lean people have ordinary Type 2 diabetes.

So this list cannot tell you which you have. What it can do is justify asking for a GAD antibody test, and that test can.