Type 2 Diabetes – Is It In The Genes?

Diabetes is an illness that affects the way the body handles glucose. Across the world, an estimated 400,000 people suffer from this illness. Most of those are people that have type 2 diabetes.

Medical sources indicate that 27 million people in the USA have type 2 diabetes and another 86 million people have the precursor to that illness called ‘prediabetes‘ . Anybody over the age of 45 is at risk of type 2 diabetes, besides for other risk factors. Take care with how you move about, since seniors who have type 2 are considered at risk for fractures.

This May, an international team of scientists released findings from a study on a large population of people.

The findings show that there are several gene variations that could indicate type 2 diabetes.

Lifestyle factors such as being obese and having a specific metabolic syndrome have been considered the main causes of type 2 diabetes, up until now.

The scientists analyzed the genes of 21,000 people with type 2 and 25,000 people without diabetes. The people that were studied were from several different ancestries. Previous studies focused on study groups that were only of European ancestry. From the international group, however, the scientists hope to be able to generalize the findings in a global manner. They also believe that they will discover more gene types in the future. The scientists hope that this will help towards improving understanding of the disease and its treatment.

To this end the scientists publicized their work in the type 2 Diabetes Knowledge Portal so that people all over the world can use the results and advance the research.

The discovery of the new gene formations gives a new picture of the part that DNA variation play in diabetes.

As part of staying healthy and as a way of fighting diabetes going forward, doctors suggest the following:

More about a healthy lifestyle for seniors, health tips and healthy eating will appear in later articles.