Open AccessEthnic diversity in type 2 diabetes genetics between East Asians and Europeans
Author(s) -
Kato Norihiro
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
journal of diabetes investigation
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.089
H-Index - 50
eISSN - 2040-1124
pISSN - 2040-1116
DOI - 10.1111/j.2040-1124.2012.00222.x
Subject(s) - medicine , ethnic group , diversity (politics) , type 2 diabetes , diabetes mellitus , genetics , evolutionary biology , anthropology , biology , endocrinology , sociology
We have witnessed great success in the identification of new type 2 diabetes susceptibility loci through genome‐wide association (GWA) analysis in the past 5 years. The number of loci robustly implicated in type 2 diabetes risk; that is, those that have attained a genome‐wide significance level (P 50 today. As these GWA studies were carried out almost exclusively in European‐descent populations, studies in non‐European populations will allow us to assess the relevance of the findings to other ethnic groups. To address this point, a consortium‐based GWA meta‐analysis of type 2 diabetes was recently carried out in East Asians with a multistage study design (involving >25,000 cases and >29,000 controls in total)1; eight new loci were confirmed to significantly associate with type 2 diabetes. This large‐scale GWA meta‐analysis was principally carried out in the Asian Genetic Epidemiology Network (AGEN), in which our group participated together with investigators from Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore and the USA.