We thank Drs. Mejía-León and Calderón de la Barca for their comments (1) on our article published in Diabetes (2). They state that “Alkanani et al. considered a very wide age range (2–45 years), but later adjusted it to include only subjects younger than 18 years. As a result, the microbiota variability of the youngest age-group may have subtracted significance from their results by avoiding the detection of further differences between their groups” (1). In fact, we performed two separate analyses to address the age-range of our cohorts. First, as stated in the statistical analysis section in research design and methods, we compared the relative abundance of taxa across groups after adjusting for clinical covariates such as age, sex, autoantibody presence, and HLA genotype. In this analysis, all subjects at ages 2–45 years were included, and the data are presented in Fig. 2, Table 2, and Supplementary Tables 1 and 2 of our article. In the second analysis, we compared across groups after restricting the analysis to include only individuals under the age of 18 years, and the data from this analysis is discussed in the results section. The first analysis was performed to identify microbes that differed across groups while accounting for age differences, while the second approach was taken to make the subcohort compatible with previous studies (3) and the analysis more straightforward. We hope that this clarifies the strategy we used to address the age issue.
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Duality of Interest. No potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article were reported.