We thank Blanco et al. (1) for their letter on our article, which confirmed the utility of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) as a clinical biomarker to discriminate patients with HNF1A-MODY from patients with type 2 diabetes (2).
We agree with the authors that the discrimination between HNF1A-MODY and type 2 diabetes is likely to be enhanced by elevated levels of hs-CRP in type 2 diabetes as a result of mild chronic inflammation and fatty liver in combination with the unique mechanism of decreased levels of CRP expression in HNF1A-MODY. This is consistent with our findings that hs-CRP has the greatest clinical utility to distinguish between HNF1A-MODY and type 2 diabetes than between other diabetes subgroups (2–4).
Since the initial article by Owen et al. (3), these results have been replicated in over 700 patients with confirmed HNF1A-MODY across nine European centers using five different hs-CRP analytical platforms. All of these studies found that hs-CRP distinguished HNF1A-MODY from type 2 diabetes with a high diagnostic accuracy, with the C-statistic ranging from 0.79 to 0.97 (2–5). These results indicate that hs-CRP is a robust test that can be used to aid in the identification of HNF1A-MODY patients. The wide availability and low-cost of the hs-CRP test means it could be readily used in routine clinical practice.
Article Information
A.T.H. is supported by the National Institute for Health Research Peninsula Clinical Research Facility, University of Exeter. A.L.G. is a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science (095101/Z/10/Z). K.R.O. is a National Institute for Health Research–funded Clinician Scientist. The study was funded by the European Commission FP7 programs CEED3 (HEALTH-F2-2008-223211).
No potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article were reported.
