Aside from speculating that many people may carry genes that predispose them to diabetes, researchers have been at loss to explain why, for instance, only 2 percent of Europeans contract the disease as opposed to 13 percent of African Americans, 17 percent of U.S. Latinos and up to 50 percent of Native Americans.
"Immediately following Europe's last widespread famines centuries ago, a diabetes epidemic appears to have killed a large number of Europeans with these genes before they could be passed on to successive generations," said Jared Diamond, a UCLA professor of geography and environmental heath sciences. "Meanwhile, traditionally poor or rural non-European populations have not experienced a diabetes epidemic -- until lately. So these people still carry the genes in large measure, and as a result they become highly prone to diabetes when they move into urban or Westernized settings, where the disease's risk factors are more common."
If accurate, Diamond's theory means today's soaring diabetes rates will continue to mount as people whose ancestors were never exposed to the epidemic adopt the disease's twin risk factors: abundant food and more sedentary lifestyles. Already, the disease affects 150 million worldwide.
"At its present rate of increase, within a few decades diabetes will become one of the world's commonest diseases and biggest public health problems with an estimated minimum of half-a-billion cases," Diamond writes in the June 5 Nature article.
The findings relate only to type II -- or so-called adult-onset -- diabetes, a form of resistance to insulin, the human hormone responsible for controlling blood sugar. When left unchecked, elevated levels of blo
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Contact: Meg Sullivan
megs@college.ucla.edu
310-825-1046
University of California - Los Angeles
4-Jun-2003