Scientists at the SMS Medical College and Hospital, Jaipur have succeeded in locating the ‘genome’ that triggers diabetes at a very early age.

This genome is identified as a group of genes shared by insulin resistance and is labeled as a metagenome of insulin resistance.

Also in the future, one would be able to predict if a person is going to develop diabetic or not with the help of this metagenome long before its onset, says Dr Sandeep Kumar Mathur, who led a team of scientists in carrying out this landmark research.

Dr Mathur says diabetes is a symptom or manifestation of a disease of fat tissue, so called “adiposopathy” or “sick fat. Generally speaking, diabetes is identified with a high glucose level in the blood. This high glucose level in blood may be due to high calories, high fat (obesity), environmental pollution, mental stress, or aging factors that affect insulin resistance in the several organs like liver, muscle, fat tissue, etc.

The metagenome of insulin resistance can predict the future risk of diabetes many years before its onset in the early age of life of a person. The person would not have to wait for the detection of diabetes through blood sugar tests in the case of Type 2 diabetes.  The metagenomes could also be the precursor for identifying the different subtypes of disease. It has been found from metagenomes that there is a 70-80 per cent possibility of diabetes in patients who ignore rising obesity, mental stress, healthy food habits, and regular body exercise.

“The global prevalence of insulin resistance (IR) has been estimated to range from 15.5 to 46.5 per cent among adults. It has been identified as a central pathophysiological factor of several endocrine–metabolic disorders, such as Type 2 diabetes (T2D), high blood pressure, dyslipidemias, polycystic ovary syndrome, cardiovascular diseases etc., (so called Metabolic Syndrome).

“More significantly, insulin resistance precedes, and could lead to Type 2 Diabetes, which now affects over 422 million people globally and accounts for 1.5 million deaths annually”, Dr Mathur adds. Apart from Dr Mathur, Dr Aditya Saxena, Dr Nitish Mathur, and Dr Pradeep Tiwari are other scientists who published this paper.

About the cure for diabetes, Dr Mathur said plenty of drugs of various names and brands are available to control the sugar level in the blood of a patient but unfortunately, the drugs to precisely cure the underlying molecular mechanisms of ‘Insulin Resistance’ and adiposopathy are not available in the market so the disease could be controlled from the roots. However, development of several drugs are in the process that acts by mechanisms shared with the metagenome identified in this research, he says.