US’ Centre for Disease Control has classified diabetes as a chronic, incurable disease. Diabetes increases the risk of several diseases. According to statistics, 57 million Indians will be affected by diabetes by 2025. Indian researchers have identified a genetic variation strongly linked with diabetes in India. The study was conducted by researchers from the New Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, or IGIB, and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, also in the Capital. IGIB is part of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, or CSIR.

The present research was a part of ongoing CSIR project to unravel the molecular mechanism and genetic factors underlying diabetes in India. For this study, researchers analyzed the data collected from 1,656 people, mostly from in and around Delhi.

Dwaipayan Bharadwaj, a senior scientist at IGIB and one of the authors of the study said, “We’ve essentially shown that specific polymorphisms (variants) of the FOXA2 gene are strongly linked with diabetes in India”. He added that though the study spanned 1,656 people, mostly from in and around Delhi, we need to further study populations in the south, for example. But we are confident that we can extrapolate these studies to large swathes of India. 

Earlier studies have shown that the FOXA2 gene is a well-known regulator of pancreas development and insulin sensitivity. Researchers had suspected that the gene may have a role in the onset of diabetes. But the present study has shown that a specific variant (or polymorphism) of the gene may be responsible for a certain condition.  

Mark McCarthy, a professor of diabetes at the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, UK added that it’s a very useful study, especially because now there is increasing evidence that rare polymorphisms (those not widely distributed in ethnic populations) may have a large effect in triggering diabetes among certain groups.

Researchers believe that identifying genes can help early detection; together with a proper diet and exercise, it can greatly reduce the risk of diabetes-related complications such as heart disease and hypertension.