Diabetes in Bay Area Chinese Population Linked to Fat Fibrosis

Note: Study lead, Diana Alba, MD, received support from CTSI's Pilot Awards program for work with this IDEO cohort.

A new UC San Francisco study has discovered a key biological difference in how people of European and Chinese descent put on weight — a finding that could help explain why Asians often develop type 2 diabetes at a much lower body weight than Caucasians. 

The research, published online May 28, 2018 in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, could be used to develop new biomarkers for diabetes risk in Asian populations and could even lead to new classes of drugs to slow the progression of the disease across all ethnicities, the authors say.

The worldwide epidemic of type 2 diabetes has long been associated with rising levels of obesity. But while obesity is certainly a major risk factor for the disease, particularly in Caucasians, only a minority of people with obesity actually develop the disease, says UCSF Health endocrinologist Suneil Koliwad, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine and member of the Diabetes Center at UCSF. 

On the other hand, some ethnic groups, such as people of Asian and South Asian descent, often develop type 2 diabetes long before they would be considered obese. As a result, people in Asian communities get type 2 diabetes more frequently and at a younger age than Caucasians, and are often diagnosed late because clinicians don’t expect to see the disease in young people who appear otherwise healthy. 

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