The quality of this article is rather poor. It's almost beyond belief that they didn't consult with Prof. Andrew Hattersley, who is regarded as one of the world leading experts in this.

We have known for many many years about several other types of diabetes. It is what I research as my job.

Type 1 is caused by the autoimmune destruction of the beta cells in the pancreas that generate insulin, and the patient becomes dependent on injected insulin.

Type 2 is caused by a progression from the body becoming resistant to insulin due to being overweight, the beta cells generating more insulin to compensate, and then eventually the beta cells burning out. Along the way, treatment progresses from diet, to tablets such as metformin, and eventually to insulin injections. Many people think that you progress to type 1 when you become dependent on injected insulin, but that is not the case - it is still type 2.

There is gestational diabetes, where the huge changes in the body caused by pregnancy can trigger temporary diabetes (although sometimes it persists for a while after pregnancy). For this reason, we tend to test the blood sugar level of pregnant women.

Then we have MODY (Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young), which is a form of monogenic diabetes. There are at least 10 types, caused by single gene defects in various genes. The treatment and prognosis depends on the gene which is defective. For instance, if you have one of your two copies of the GCK gene defective, then you get GCK MODY, which typically has few symptoms, but is usually detected when a woman is pregnant and has their blood sugar levels tested. The danger with GCK MODY is over-treatment - they do not need any treatment at all, but doctors may try to lower the blood sugar levels by giving insulin injections, which can be dangerous. Other forms of MODY do require insulin.

There is also Neonatal Diabetes (NDM), which has two broad types, being permanent and transient, and there are several different sub-types depending on the gene defect. In this case, you are generally diagnosed with diabetes under the age of six months, and sometimes as young as hours after birth. If both of your copies of the GCK gene are defective, you will get permanent neonatal diabetes, and require insulin injections for life, from birth. However, if you have neonatal diabetes caused by defects in the ABCC8 or KCNJ11 genes, treatment with sulfonylurea tablets is highly effective. It is important to obtain a genetic diagnosis in order to get the correct treatment.

There are other types of diabetes other than these. It is very weird for this article to be claiming the fact that there is more than just type 1 and type 2 to be news - it has been widely known for many years.

A lot of the recent work has been on trying to distinguish the different types of diabetes. Neonatal diabetes is easy to distinguish, because it has a severe early onset. It is possible to determine the genetic cause in about 80% of patients that have this condition, and we are confident that further searches will reveal a large proportion of the remainder. MODY is however too similar to type 1 diabetes, so of patients sent for genetic testing for MODY, a proportion of them will have type 1 instead, so the genetic test success rate is lower, around 30%. Genetic risk scores for the autoimmune type 1 diabetes response are used to try and distinguish the two, in order to try and perform gene discovery research on as pure a MODY cohort as possible.