ASA urges patients to make lifestyle changes before opting for complicated surgeries
January 22, 2016
The discovery highlights the role of incretin hormones, which are released from endocrine cells in the gut. "This finding adds to a growing body of evidence implicating the incretin pathways in type 2 diabetes risk. These pathways, which stimulate insulin secretion in response to digestion of food, may offer a potential avenue for therapeutic intervention," said senior author Richard Watanabe, Ph.D., of the University of Southern California.
The variants were found in populations of European descent, but the researchers expect that some will have similar effects in other populations. Future research will attempt to answer that question. "Even with the discovery of these variants, we've only explained about 10 percent of the genetic contribution to fasting glucose in people who do not have diabetes," Florez cautioned. Yet undiscovered genes may be found by studies that increase sample sizes to detect smaller effects and look for less common variants as well as non-SNP variants-for example, insertions, deletions, and duplications of DNA that haven't been well studied yet.
About 24 million people in the United States have diabetes. Worldwide, about 285 million people have the disease, according to the International Diabetes Federation. Diabetes is the main cause of kidney failure, limb amputations, and new onset blindness in adults and is a major cause of heart disease and stroke. Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for up to 95 percent of all diabetes cases, becomes more common with increasing age. It is strongly associated with obesity, inactivity, family history of diabetes, history of gestational diabetes, impaired glucose metabolism, and racial or ethnic background. The prevalence of diagnosed diabetes has more than doubled in the last 30 years, due in large part to the upsurge in obesity. For more information about diabetes, visit diabetes.niddk.nih/index.htm.
The MAGIC studies required extensive collaboration by many researchers on both sides of the Atlantic.* The consortium found the genes and replicated the findings by analyzing genetic samples from up to 122,743 individuals who took part in 54 different studies funded by many publicly and privately funded sources in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Ten of these studies** were funded by components of the NIH, including the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the National Center for Research Resources. One study, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, is conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Source: NIH/National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases