Scots study to improve treatments

latest asthma breakthrough came from studying people in South Asia who were less susceptible to the condition, and, coincidentally, it’s the same population that is helping Scottish scientists make major headway in developing new treatments for diabetes.

Researchers at the University of Dundee recently helped identify distinct forms of type 2 diabetes in South Asians, a development with important implications for prognosis and management of the disease.

The majority of knowledge surrounding diabetes and its complications traditionally comes from studying white populations with Western ‘UNIQUE FINDINGS’ Professor Colin Palmer, of Dundee University’s School of Medicine European ancestry, despite the fact that diabetes in Europeans is very different to that in Asians, referred to as the “Asian Indian phenotype”.

This prevalence of diabetes there has led to the creation of INSPIRED, a £7 million Dundee-led project that seeks to improve diabetes outcomes in India by working to better understand who gets diabetes, how it progresses, why some people respond better than others to treatments and why some patients develop complications.

In its latest paper, published in BMJ Open Diabetes Research and Care, the INSPIRED team revealed that type 2 diabetes in Asian Indians can be classified into four distinct types.

Professor Colin Palmer, of the university’s School of Medicine, said: “These findings appear to be completely unique to Indians as they differ significantly from the findings published earlier in the European population.

“The study confirms the greater insulin secretory defect and the younger age at onset of diabetes in South Asians.”