"The fact that not all genes involved with raising glucose levels increase diabetes risk tells us that it's not the mere fact of raising glucose that's important but rather how glucose is raised. It's one thing to increase glucose slightly within the normal range and quite another to affect a pathway that eventually leads to progressive glucose elevation, beta-cell failure or insulin resistance - in other words type 2 diabetes, " says Florez, who is an assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "We've still only identified about 10 percent of the genetic contribution to glucose levels in nondiabetic individuals, so we need to investigate the impact of other, possibly more complex or rare forms of gene variation, along with the role of gene-environment interactions, in causing type 2 diabetes. Performing similar studies in non-European populations will also be essential."

In-s Barroso, PhD, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, England, is the co-lead author of the Nature Genetics report; and additional corresponding authors are Mark McCarthy, MD, University of Oxford, and Michael Boehnke, PhD, University of Michigan. Equally contributing first authors are Jos-e Dupuis, PhD, Boston University; Claudia Langenberg, PhD, University of Cambridge; Inga Prokopenko, PhD, University of Oxford; Richa Saxena, PhD, MGH; and Nicole Soranzo, PhD, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. The current study and many of the earlier studies were largely supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Massachusetts General Hospital, established in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of more than $600 million and major research centers in AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, systems biology, transplantation biology and photomedicine.

Source: Massachusetts General Hospital