In a new study, researchers have identified new genetic links with type 2 diabetes among 433,540 people.
It is the largest study of its kind in any non-European population.
The research was conducted by an international team of researchers, including one from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The goal is to identify potential genetic targets to treat or even cure the chronic metabolic disorder that affects and sometimes debilitate more than 400 million adults worldwide, according to the International Diabetes Federation.
The team analyzed data from 433,540 East Asians, including 77,418 with type 2 diabetes—emerges from the consortia known as AGEN.
Such large-scale genome-wide association studies in diverse populations have the potential to uncover the genes, biology, and pathways related to diseases.
In the new analysis, the researchers used genome-wide association data from 23 cohort studies to examine type 2 diabetes risk in East Asian individuals and found 301 distinct association signals at 183 loci or specific positions on a chromosome.
Sixty-one of the loci were newly implicated in the predisposition for type 2 diabetes.
These findings expand the number of genetic variances associated with diabetes and highlight the importance of studying different ancestries.
For many years, these studies have been done primarily in white European populations.
There are DNA variants that are seen in some populations and not in others. Learning about the additional variants can help identify additional genes that influence a person’s risk for developing type 2 diabetes.
That could help explain, for example, why among people of similar body mass index (BMI) or waist circumference, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes is greater in East Asian populations than in European populations.
The next steps are to combine discovery across populations and to experimentally determine which genes are altered by the genetic variants and how those alterations lead to disease.
One author of the study is statistician Cassandra Spracklen, an assistant professor of biostatistics and epidemiology in the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences.
The study is published in Nature.
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