Physiology insights

Abstract

In recent years, the search for genetic determinants of type 2 diabetes has resulted in identification of numerous type 2 diabetes-associated loci as well as a number of loci associating with related prediabetic traits. These findings have illuminated new biological pathways contributing to the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes, but have also demonstrated that type 2 diabetes is an extremely heterogeneous disease with limited overlap between genetic loci associating with type 2 diabetes and loci associating with diabetes-related traits, such as body mass index, fasting glucose levels, and fasting insulin levels. Combined, these loci only account for a fraction of the observed familial clustering of type 2 diabetes and only up to about 10 % of the variation in prediabetic quantitative traits. Improved methods are needed to dig deeper into a biological understanding of the pathophysiology of type 2 diabetes.