In the early 1950s, British physician Philip Hugh-Jones was flummoxed by 13 patients who showed up at the diabetes clinic he ran near Kingston, Jamaica.

At the time, researchers broadly recognized two kinds of diabetes, known today as Type 1 and Type 2. Hugh-Jones himself coined those terms in a study of hundreds of patients published in 1955.

Most of his patients fell into those two buckets, but that group of 13 people didn't fit into either category, says Michael Boyne , an endocrinologist at the University of the West Indies, where Hugh-Jones did his research.

"They were relatively young, thin and kind of undernourished looking," says Boyne.

Normally, that would point to Type 1 diabetes, where individuals are unable to make their own insulin and can become underweight.

But these

See Full Page