Scientists from Helmholtz Munich and an international team have made an important discovery in the fight against type 2 diabetes (T2D).
Using global genetic data, they identified genes and proteins linked to the disease—revealing that blood samples alone may miss many of the signals that cause diabetes.
Their study, published in Nature Metabolism, highlights the importance of looking beyond blood and including different body tissues and genetic backgrounds to better understand the disease.
Type 2 diabetes is a complex disease that involves several organs and cell types, such as fat tissue, the liver, muscles, and especially the pancreas, which produces insulin.
Until now, many studies have used blood samples to look for genetic clues about diabetes, mainly because blood is easy to collect. However, the new study shows that this approach is incomplete.
Dr. Ozvan Bocher, the lead author from Université de Bretagne Occidentale and Helmholtz Munich, explained that their team studied seven different tissues linked to diabetes. They found strong genetic evidence for 676 genes that could be involved in the disease.
Shockingly, 85% of these genes would not have been found by analyzing blood alone. Only 18% of the genes found in key diabetes tissues also showed signals in blood samples.
This means that to truly understand how type 2 diabetes works, scientists need to examine the actual tissues involved in the disease—not just blood.
The study also used data from more than 2.5 million people from around the world, thanks to the Type 2 Diabetes Global Genomics Initiative (T2DGGI). This large-scale project combines data from people of different ancestries, including over 700,000 individuals who are not of European descent.
With this rich dataset, the researchers tested more than 20,000 genes and over 1,600 proteins across four ancestry groups—European, African, American, and East Asian.
They used a method called cis-QTL analysis, which looks at how genetic variants near a gene affect the gene’s activity or the amount of its protein. As a result, they found 335 genes and 46 proteins that are likely to play a role in type 2 diabetes.
Many of these gene and protein links were confirmed in other studies using different populations. Interestingly, some genetic effects only appeared in groups that had been underrepresented in earlier research, showing the value of including diverse populations.
Professor Eleftheria Zeggini, senior author and Director at the Institute of Translational Genomics at Helmholtz Munich, emphasized that understanding type 2 diabetes requires more than just genetics—it requires considering which tissues are affected and how genes behave differently across populations.
These findings could help create better diagnostic tools and treatments that work for people of all backgrounds.
In summary, this groundbreaking study shows that looking only at blood samples is not enough to understand type 2 diabetes.
To get the full picture, researchers must study the organs directly involved in the disease and include genetic data from people around the world. This approach brings us closer to uncovering the true causes of diabetes and finding better ways to treat and prevent it.
If you care about diabetes, please read studies about 5 vitamins that may prevent complication in diabetes, and how to manage high blood pressure and diabetes with healthy foods.
For more health information, please see recent studies about vitamin D and type2 diabetes, and to people with type 2 diabetes, some fruits are better than others.
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