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IMAGE: Cassandra Spracklen is an assistant professor of biostatistics and epidemiology in the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences.
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Credit: UMass Amherst
By ensuring ethnic diversity in a largescale genetic study, an international team of researchers, including a University of Massachusetts Amherst genetic epidemiologist, has identified more regions of the genome linked to type 2 diabetes-related traits.
The findings, published May 31 in
Nature Genetics, broaden the understanding of the biological basis of type 2 diabetes and demonstrate that expanding research into different ancestries yields better results. Ultimately the goal is to improve patient care worldwide by identifying genetic targets to treat the chronic metabolic disorder. Type 2 diabetes affects and sometimes debilitates more than 460 million adults worldwide, according to the International Diabetes Federation. About 1.5 million deaths were directly caused by diabetes in 2019, the World Health Organization reports.