Genetic diabetes test powerful in persons of Indian heritage
25 June, 2020
There are concerns that doctors could misdiagnose diabetes in India because of more significant rates of type 2 diabetes in younger and slimmer people. A fresh study has shown an existing genetic test could effectively diagnose diabetes in people of Indian heritage.
Although people often use the word diabetes to spell it out one condition, there are two different types of diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that triggers damage to the beta cells found in the pancreas that manufacture insulin. Too little insulin is the principal characteristic of type 1 diabetes.
Treatment involves regular injections with insulin.
Type 2 diabetes is the more common sort of diabetes. It is not an autoimmune state and typically involves level of resistance to rather than too little insulin.
Treatments include prescription drugs to improve insulin sensitivity and changes in lifestyle, such as carrying out a healthful diet.
Previously, authorities have associated the two forms with different age ranges:
Type 1 diabetes tends to occur found in younger people.
Type 2 is much more likely to occur in people over 45 years who have a higher overall body mass index (BMI).
However, this look at is shifting because of rising costs of childhood obesity and recent results that type 1 diabetes can occur later in life.
This has resulted in concerns regarding misdiagnosis, particularly in Indian populations, where there is a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes in younger and slimmer people.
Furthermore, scientists have carried out most research on type 1 diabetes in European populations, this means existing diagnostic tools might not apply.
The problem of misdiagnosis
Misdiagnosis found in diabetes is a growing concern. One recent study of 583 individuals from the population-based Exeter Diabetes Alliance for Analysis in England (DARE) in britain found that almost 40% of men and women with type 1 diabetes didn't get a correct initial medical diagnosis and received treatment for type 2 diabetes.
Diagnosing diabetes accurately can be vital because administering the incorrect treatment could have extreme consequences, such as for example diabetic ketoacidosis.
“Diagnosing the proper diabetes type can be an increasingly difficult task for clinicians, because we now understand that type 1 diabetes may appear at any age group. This task is also harder in India, as even more cases of type 2 diabetes occur in persons with low BMI,” clarifies Dr. Richard Oram of the Institute of Biomedical and Clinical Technology at the University of Exeter Medical University in the U.K.
A collaborative study between experts in Hyderabad in India and the University of Exeter has viewed the effectiveness of current genetic risk ratings for diagnosing type 1 diabetes in Indian populations.
The authors published the analysis in Scientific Reports.
The researchers assessed if the genetic risk score can effectively discriminate between type 1 and type 2 diabetes in persons from Pune in the west of India, who were of Indo-European ancestry.
They analyzed 262 persons with confirmed type 1 diabetes, 345 persons with type 2 diabetes, and a control band of 324 people who didn't have diabetes. They then compared the outcomes with those of European people from the Wellcome Trust Circumstance Control Consortium study.
Risk score effective in Indian people
The researchers discovered that the current genetic risk score is effective at diagnosing diabetes in Indian populations, despite the fact that the original info were from European people.
However, the team also identified new genetic dissimilarities between European and Indian populations, making the test even more accurate for Indian people.
They found nine new genetic variants (single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) that correlate with type 1 diabetes in both teams that doctors might use to predict the starting point of the condition in Indian people.
“It’s interesting to note that different SNPs are actually considerably more abundant among Indian and European individuals. This opens up the possibility that environmental factors could be getting together with these SNPs to cause the disease,” explains Dr.G. R Chandak, the scientist leading the analysis at the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India.
The results are good news for doctors using this score to diagnose persons in India.
Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com
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