Document is current

Article History

Received: 30 May 2025

Accepted: 15 December 2025

First Online: 10 February 2026

Acknowledgements

: We thank the population from Cantalupo for their generous participation, the Municipal Authorities, the physicians of the UNISCREEN Study Group from San Raffaele University (listed in [ ]), the participant nurses and the volunteers from Fondazione Italiana Diabete, local Civil Protection, Red Cross and Rotary Club for their professional, enthusiastic and continuous support throughout the study. This manuscript was prepared with the assistance of Claude 4.5 sonnet, a large language model, for drafting, language editing, statistical analysis code generation and editing. The authors acknowledge the use of this AI technology and have reviewed and validated the content to ensure its accuracy and integrity. The authors are solely responsible for the content and conclusions of this work.

: The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to privacy and ethical restrictions, as they contain sensitive health information from a small, identifiable community. However, anonymised data are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request, subject to approval by the Ethics Committee of San Raffaele Hospital, Milan, Italy, and completion of appropriate data sharing agreements.

: The UNISCREEN Study was conducted in collaboration with Fondazione Italiana Diabete (FID), Milan, Italy, which provided financial support (FID grant 07/2023) and operational contributions including coordination of the public information campaign, organisation of fieldwork logistics for sample collection and procurement of sample collection materials. Islet autoantibody LIPS immunoassays were developed with the support of Breakthrough T1D (Grant Keys: 2-SRA-2015-50-Q-R, 2-SRA-2018-534-S-B, 2-SRA-2020-964-S-B) and the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust (Grant Key: 2-SRA-2015-50-Q-R).

: The authors declare that there are no relationships or activities that might bias, or be perceived to bias, their work.

: All authors have contributed substantially to the study in terms of conception or design, data acquisition, analysis or interpretation, and have critically reviewed the manuscript for important intellectual content. All authors approved the article in its final version. In detail: IM drafted the manuscript and conducted data analyses and interpretation; CB was responsible for autoantibody measurements and initial data analysis; E. Bazzigaluppi was responsible for autoantibody measurements and initial data analysis; SM, AL, GA, SA, E. Borgonovo, AS, GP and MM contributed to data collection and evaluation; FU contributed to data collection and evaluation and project administration; KG contributed to assay development, validation and manuscript editing; PA contributed to assay development, validation, threshold selection and manuscript editing; WH contributed to assay development, validation and manuscript editing; VL supervised autoantibody measurements, conducted data analyses and interpretation, and contributed to manuscript drafting and editing; E. Bosi conceived, designed and oversaw the study, participated in person to screening procedures, wrote the study protocol and participated in drafting and editing the final manuscript. E. Bosi is responsible for the integrity of the work as a whole.