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The Role Of Genetic Factors And Contribution To The Risk For Type 2 Diabetes

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There is extensive and consistent evidence that genetic factors play an important role in modifying an individuals risk for type 2 diabetes of which 70 or more genetic variants have now been associated (Ali,2013) from GWAS studies yet type-2-diabetes genetic risk has limited genes of major effect. Thus, the search for genes contributing to the risk of T2D has been difficult, and the genes themselves have been elusive. A series of genome-wide association scans for type 2 diabetes has been published which shows hundreds of thousands of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the genome which have been assayed in samples from populations of almost exclusively European ancestry, and novel genes such as TCF7L2, SLC30A8, IDE-KIF 11-HHEX, …show more content…

99.9% of the bases in the human genome are remarkably similar; it is the remaining 0.1% of the bases that make an individual unique (Huang, Shu and Cai, 2015). Among this 0.1% of bases, more than 90% are SNPs (FS. Collins, LD Brooks and A.Chakravarti, 1998). Barbujani et al. (1997) estimated that 85% of SNPs are common to all human populations and that only 15% of SNPs are population specific. Huang, Shu and Cai, (2015) found that SNPs could contribute to many different characteristics, including skin colour, eye colour and the risk of diseases among different populations. Many ethnic minorities in Europe have a higher type 2 diabetes prevalence than their host European populations. The risk size differs between ethnic groups, but the extent of the differences in the various ethnic minority groups has not yet been systematically quantified. Meeks et al. (2015) carried out a meta-analysis of published data on T2D in various ethnic minority populations resident in Europe compared to their host European populations. In this study the ethnic minorities were classified into five populations by geographical origin: South Asian (SA), Sub-Saharan African (SSA), Middle Eastern and North America (MENA), South and Central American (SCA), and Western Pacific (WP). Compared with host populations, SA origin populations had the highest

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