Authors: Marco Dauriz James B Meigs
Publish Date: 2016/04/26
Volume: 59, Issue: 7, Pages: 1400-1402
Abstract
The study of human genetic variation represents a major chapter in the history of modern medicine and still holds the fascinating promise of identifying the genetic architecture of a large number of disease traits 1 2 This is particularly relevant nowadays in light of the prospective rising trends in the global incidence and prevalence of type 2 diabetes 3 However the noncommunicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes carry a considerable burden of complexity as a result of the combination of genetic epigenetic and environmental risk factors 4 which complicate the understanding of type 2 diabetes genetic background and its potential clinical transferability in terms of prognostic and preventive rules or potentially novel drug targetsThe technical and methodological advancements as well as the knowledge accrued over the past decade on the haplotype block structure of the human genome 1 5 have enabled investigators to tackle the complexity of the genetic architecture of type 2 diabetes in populations of European and nonEuropean descent by performing largescale genomewide association studies GWAS for both common and rare genetic variants 2 6 To date the international research consortia leading these initiatives have identified over 90 genetic loci credibly associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes and more are expected in the years to come When considered in aggregate the loci identified explain only a limited proportion of the type 2 diabetes liabilityscale variance possibly because the total number of the entire spectrum of type 2 diabetes risk loci has yet to be identified or because the causal variants harbored in or near these loci as well as the underlying biological pathways remain to be elucidated in most instances
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