Early warning signs of adult type 2 diabetes can be easily seen in kids as young as eight years old, reveals a new study.
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‘Early warning signs of adult diabetes can be easily spotted in kids as young as 8 years old.’
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Analyzing genetic information known to increase the chances of type 2 diabetes (T2D) in adulthood together with measures of metabolism across early life, researchers found that being more susceptible to adult diabetes affected a child's levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) (good) cholesterol, essential amino acids, and a chronic inflammatory trait measured in the blood. Certain types of HDL lipids were among the earliest features of susceptibility to T2D.Read More..
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These metabolic features could be targeted to prevent young people from going on to develop T2D in the future, researchers say.
"It's remarkable that we can see signs of adult diabetes in the blood from such a young age--this is about 50 years before it's commonly diagnosed", says Dr Joshua Bell from the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol, UK who co-led the research. "This is not a clinical study; nearly all participants were free of diabetes and most will not go on to develop it. This is about liability to disease and how genetics can tell us something about how the disease develops."
The study tracked over 4,000 participants of the Children of the 90s study-a birth cohort established in Bristol, UK in the early 1990s. Researchers combined genetics with an approach called 'metabolomics', which involves measuring many small molecules in a blood sample to try and identify patterns that are unique to type 2 diabetes.
The effects of a genetic risk score (including 162 genetic elements) for adult type 2 diabetes were examined on over 200 metabolic traits measured 4 times on the same participants--once in childhood (when aged 8 years), twice in adolescence (when aged 16 years and 18 years), and once in young adulthood (when aged 25 years).
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"If we want to prevent diabetes, we need to know how it starts. Genetics can help with that, but our aim here is to learn how diabetes develops, not to predict who will and will not develop it. Other methods may help with prediction but won't necessarily tell us where to intervene", says Dr Bell.
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Source-Eurekalert