Childhood leukaemia around the La Hague nuclear waste reprocessing plant.

the first five years of the disease. There have been a few reports of proliferative retinopathy developing at an early stage of type I diabetes,2 and proliferative retinopathy is occasionally seen as a presenting feature of type II diabetes, usually in patients aged 40 or older.' In case 1 the patient had typical type I diabetes with islet cell antibodies and no residual f cell function. The other patient was less typical of patients with type I diabetes as he had residual i cell function and had been obese some years previously. Both patients, however, had the HLA-DR tissue type typical of type I diabetes.4 It has been suggested that this predisposes to proliferative diabetic retinopathy, though a recent study could not confirm this.> As duration of diabetes is so powerful a predictor of retinopathy, both patients had probably had undetected diabetes for many years. They may also have had some other underlying factor facilitating the rapid development of their complications.'