Do dogs develop autoimmune diabetes?

Excerpt

Humans have obvious disadvantages for the study of diabetes. A domesticated yet outbred species, their breeding behaviour is casual and unregulated. They cannot identify their own fathers with >95% confidence, and few can trace their descent for more than five generations. Their lifespan is inconveniently long, experimental conditions such as diet and housing are difficult to standardise, and ethical and legal constraints limit the range of experiments that can be performed upon them, let alone their sacrifice and dissection at the conclusion of research studies. This species readily develops spontaneous diabetes when provided with a suitable environment, but the disorder is heterogeneous and phenotypic characterisation can be challenging. It therefore comes as no surprise that most experimental research in diabetes is performed in other animals, and tends to be published in more exclusive journals [1]. …