The genetic causes that predispose to a greater risk of type II diabetes, which suffers or will do so at some time in their lives one in ten people in the world, have been exposed in a study that offers the most detailed image until theMoment of variations in DNA that underlies the disease.The most complete radiography of the pathology, published in Nature, shows the way to potential treatments and is a decisive step towards personalized therapies of patients based on their genetic profile, as it is now done in certain types of cancer.
The magnitude of the research, led among other institutions by the University of Oxford (England) and Misthagan (USA), is demonstrated by the fact that more than 300 scientific patients from 22 countries participated in work, including Galician experts, which analyzed genetic data of more than 120,000 people from different regions of the planet.In 2,600 individuals what was traced was the complete genome, a huge figure for this type of studies, and in another 13,000 the exom, the part of the genes that translate into proteins, and which was compared with that of many other samples ofhealthy individuals.
"To be able to offer a personalized medicine we have to have a detailed map of the disease and this study what it offers is an in -depth look of the diabetes architecture, how it works," explains Galician researcher Juan Fernández, one of the authorsof the study and that has been working at the Wellcoma Trust Center for Human Genetics of the University of Oxford for more than four years.
The examination of the data has offered a surprising conclusion: the main cause of the genetic risk of suffering the disease is in small variations of the DNA that are common and shared by most of the populations, when so far what was believed was thatIn this type of complex diseases the predominant role fell to a combination of rare and common alterations that occur in the order of the genome sequence.
"Really - Juan Fernández consists," the percentage of variation explained by type II diabetes is due to changes in DNA that are quite common among populations, which many people can have. "
More specifically, the work has identified more than a dozen regions in the genome that are associated with the risk of type II diabetes.
One of the localized variants occurs in the TM6SF2 gene, which alters the amount of fat stored in the liver, which in turn constitutes a factor that predisposes to a disease that threatens to become an authentic epidemicChallenges for health systems around the world.
Another risk genes, Pax4, has been detected exclusively in individuals in southeast Asia, such as Korea, China and Singapore."In this study, we highlight, with unprecedented precision, a series of genes that participate directly in the development of type 2 diabetes. These represent a promising way to design new ways of treating or preventing the disease," explains MarcMcCarthy, one of the three main authors of the article and assigned to the Welcoma Trust Center for Human Genetics.The huge amount of data analyzed is now made available to the world scientific community to advance in new therapies.
The key
Common variants.In the population's DNA, the study concludes that most of the genetic risk of type 2 diabetes can be attributed to common differences and shared in the genetic code of populations.
More information on the website www.type2Diabetesgenetics.org
