Oklahoma residents with a certain type of diabetes may have been misdiagnosed by their physicians. Type 1 and type 2diabetes mellitus are the two most commonly known types. However, there is a third type of diabetes, type 3c, that some physicians believe is being routinely misdiagnosed.
Type 3c diabetes results from an impaired pancreas. The results of one study has indicated that there is a high likelihood that physicians are misdiagnosing type 3c diabetes for type 2 diabetes. This is concerning because different forms of treatment are needed for each. Type 3c diabetes cases that are misdiagnosed can result in a waste of money and time spent on unnecessary and inaccurate treatments, all while the patient is still suffering from high blood sugar levels.
There has long been knowledge of other forms of diabetes. Since 2008, there were concerns among researchers that type 3c diabetes was not only not being diagnosed frequently enough, but was also being misdiagnosed. One study, which involved reviewing millions of health records from the United Kingdom, gives credibility to those concerns. More than 30,000 cases of adult-onset diabetes were located. Out of those cases, 559 were found to have occurred subsequently to pancreatic disease. Even though type 3c diabetes was associated with pancreatic cancer, 88 percent of the cases were diagnosed as type 2 diabetes, while just 3 percent were determined to be type 3c diabetes.
Individuals whose diabetes has been misdiagnosed and who have been harmed as a result may be a victim of doctor error. A medical malpractice attorney may pursue financial damages against the negligent medical professionals whose care resulted in a worsened condition if it can be demonstrated that the misdiagnosis constituted a failure to exhibit the requisite standard of care.