French researchers claim to be at the origin of a serious advance for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. According to them, the identification of a mutation of DNA would allow for more accurate case management.
"Diabetes is a long-lasting excess of glucose in the blood. In the case of type 2 diabetes, this phenomenon is caused by a disturbance of carbohydrate metabolism. If it appears gradually and insidiously, the disease has serious, even fatal, long-term consequences" can we read in an INSERM publication dating from 2019.
In France, no less than 5 million people have type 2 diabetes. In general, you should know that 90% of diabetics have type 2 and that it multiplies the risk of heart attack by 3.5 myocardium. Unfortunately, current multi-drug therapies cannot avoid degenerative complications. If progress is notable, the hypothesis of genetic mutations allowing the optimization of treatments was still pending in 99% of cases.
According to a publication in Medscape on September 30, 2020, a study led by the University of Lille suggests that more precise management is possible. According to the directors of the study, patients with type 2 diabetes are carriers of a DNA mutation . The scientists analyzed the genomes of 74,629 individuals from French, British and American studies. According to results recently presented at the meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD), 2% of patients middle-aged are carriers of gene mutations linked to monogenic diabetes.
This is the gene encoding glucokinase, but also other actionable genes like ABCC8, HNF1B, HNF4A as well as KCNJ11. We already knew that familial diabetes linked to glucokinase rarely leads to complications. However, patients still receive heavy treatments. Let us cite, for example, insulin injections, which could be stopped or at least reduced. For researchers, non-insulin treatments could prove to be more effective, but also less expensive.
The study will make it possible in the near future to deliver finer diagnoses . It will above all be a question of avoiding heavy and expensive treatments for patients that do not really target the cause of diabetes. Finally, the researchers announced upcoming studies involving patients with mutations in the actionable genes of monogenic diabetes.
