Topic
Diabetes genetics
The genetics of type 2 diabetes, from gene discovery to what the variants really mean.
This page collects every article by Dr. Damon Tojjar in this topic. For all topics see browse by topic, and for the source-anchored record see damontojjar.com/record.
Articles in this topic (18)
- Adrenergic Receptors and Insulin Secretion: How Stress Signals Reach the Beta Cell
Adrenaline can switch off insulin. When the body senses a threat, the same hormone that quickens the heart also tells the pancreas to stop pouring sugar-lowering...
- Calcium Channels and the Beta Cell: How a Tiny Gate Controls Insulin
Insulin does not leave the beta cell until calcium tells it to. When blood sugar rises, the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas open a set of small protein...
- Epigenetics and Diabetes: How Environment and Early Life Tune the Genes You Already Have
Epigenetics is the layer of biology that decides how loudly or softly each gene is read, without altering the underlying DNA sequence. Think of the genome as the...
- From Association to Mechanism: How Genetics Gets From These Go Together to Here Is Why
An association tells you that two things travel together. A mechanism tells you why, in physical terms a body can obey. Genetics crosses that gap by treating every...
- Gene Environment Interaction in Diabetes: Why Neither Genes Nor Lifestyle Tells the Whole Story
Type 2 diabetes is neither written in your genes nor caused purely by how you live. It emerges from the two acting on each other. Your inherited variants set how...
- Gene Regulation and Type 2 Diabetes: Why the Control Switches Matter More Than the Genes
The short answerWhen researchers map the common DNA variants that raise the risk of type 2 diabetes, most of them do not fall inside genes at all. They sit in the...
- The Genetics of Type 2 Diabetes: What Your Genes Do and Do Not Predict
Type 2 diabetes runs in families, but it is not a single-gene disease. There is no one "diabetes gene" that you either carry or do not. The inherited risk is spread...
- Is Type 2 Diabetes Inherited? What Family History Really Means
Type 2 diabetes does run in families, but it is not inherited like eye color or a single-gene condition. What you inherit is a tilt in the odds, the combined effect...
- Linkage Versus Association: Two Ways Genetics Finds a Disease Gene
Linkage and association are two different questions genetics asks about a disease gene. Linkage follows a stretch of chromosome down through families and asks...
- Monogenic Diabetes and MODY: When One Gene Is the Cause
Most diabetes is polygenic, shaped by many genes and the environment, but a small share is monogenic, caused by a change in a single gene. The best known group is...
- Pharmacogenomics Explained: How Your Genes Can Shape the Way a Medicine Works
Pharmacogenomics is the study of how the genes you were born with can change the way a medicine acts in your body, and for a small set of drugs that knowledge is...
- Polygenic Risk Scores for Type 2 Diabetes: What They Can and Cannot Do Today
A polygenic risk score for type 2 diabetes adds up the small effects of many common gene variants into a single number that estimates your inherited predisposition...
- The Discovery of Diabetes Risk Genes: From Candidate Hunches to Genome-Wide Scans
No single gene causes type 2 diabetes for most people who develop it. Hundreds of common spots in the genome each nudge risk a little, and the disease appears when...
- The Thrifty Gene Hypothesis: An Old Idea About Why Diabetes Risk Is Common
The short answerThe thrifty gene hypothesis is the idea, first proposed in 1962, that genetic variants which helped our ancestors store energy efficiently during...
- What Genome-Wide Association Studies Show About Type 2 Diabetes
A genome-wide association study tells you where in the genome to look, not what to do about what you find. It scans the DNA of large groups, compares those who have...
- What Heritability Really Means, and What It Does Not
Heritability is a number about a population, not a verdict about a person. It estimates how much of the variation in a trait, across a particular group living in...
- Mendelian Randomization: Using Inherited Genes as a Natural Experiment
The short answerMendelian randomization is a way to test whether a biomarker actually causes a disease, rather than just traveling alongside it. It works because...
- What Twin Studies Reveal About Type 2 Diabetes
Twin studies tell us that type 2 diabetes is strongly heritable, with identical twins far more likely to share the diagnosis than fraternal twins, and they tell us...