Treatment of early diabetes

To obey the precepts of therapeutic rationality, we should avoid treating the "effect" when there a way to attack the cause. But what is the cause of diabetes? Diabetes is a molecular disease, that is, a disease in which important cellular components are seriously impaired. Eventually, the activities or the products arising from the impairment find expression in various ways, finally culminating in the abnormalities of diabetes. How early is early enough to attempt to delay this sequence of events? What will provide us with the basis to explore ways and means of halting the progression of the pathological process? What are the new approaches fro the treatment of early diabetes? The Fourth International Symposium on Early Diabetes, sponsored by the Diabetes Center of the New York Medical College, held in Algarve, Portugal in November 1978, from which this book evolved, attempted to answer some of these questions.