Diabetes genes common to humans

Monday February 10th, 2014

British researchers have helped find seven new regions of the human gene map linked to type 2 diabetes.

The discoveries, announced last night, take in thousands of patients of South Asian and Latin American origin for the first time.

The researchers say that many of the genetic variations are shared between ethnic groups - meaning they do not explain different rates of disease in different groups.

The findings, reported in Nature Genetics, come from a new analysis of details of DNA collected from more than 48,000 patients and 139,000 healthy people.

This allowed the scientists to analyse more than three million genetic variants to pin down those linked to type 2 diabetes.

The condition is often linked to lifestyle factors, such as obesity, and patients may not need to be treated with insulin.

Researcher Professor Mark McCarthy, from Oxford University, said: "The overlap in signals between populations of European, Asian and Hispanic origin argues that the risk regions we have found to date do not explain the clear differences in the patterns of diabetes between those groups."

Fellow researcher Dr Andrew Morris said: "The findings of our study should also be relevant to other common human diseases. By combining genetic data from different ethnic groups, we would expect also to be able identify new DNA variants influencing risk of heart disease and some forms of cancer, for example, which are shared across ethnic groups.

"It has the potential to have a major impact on global public health."

Genome-wide trans-ancestry meta-analysis provides insight into the genetic architecture of type 2 diabetes susceptibility. Nature Genetics 9 February 2014

Tags: Asia | Diabetes | Genetics | South America | UK News

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