Mexico has one of type 2 diabetes rates in the highest world, with 12% the population suffering from the condition, compared with 9% of people in the United States. The Mexican government is so worried that he recently declared a state of emergency and introduced a tax on soda and junk food. But a new study shows that some Mexicans may be more at risk of developing diabetes, regardless of their state of health are diet. The reason may be their Mayan ancestry, which carries with it the genetic variations associated with the disease.
"This finding is important because it could provide clues on how to fight against the disease and to plan public health strategies," especially for people of Mayan language, said María Guadalupe García, geneticist at the autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY) in Mérida, who was not involved in the research.
There may be less Maya today at the height of culture 3000 years ago, but they never disappeared. Today, speaking Maya people constitute the second largest indigenous group in Mexico, with 800,000 people living mainly in the Yucatan peninsula in south-east. Isolated culturally and geographically from other ethnic groups for thousands of years, the gene pool Maya grew increasingly homogeneous. As tends to happen with an isolated population, genetic variations that are rare in other groups became common among the Maya. clinical biochemist Marta Menjívar of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City asks whether any of these changes could increase the risk of Maya for diabetes, a growing problem in the southeast of Mexico.
team Menjívar surfed across the genomes of 575 people Maya looking for 10 genetic variants that had previously been linked to diabetes risk. They found that two are particularly common in the Maya, the researchers will report in the next month number Gene .
relatively homogeneous gene pool Maya made the changes easier to spot, says Julio César Lara Riegos, UADY geneticist and senior author of the study. But they probably are not restricted to the Mayan communities. Most Mexicans are mestizos, mixed with European, African, and Aboriginal ancestry. The average mestizo have Aboriginal ancestors about 55%, said Menjívar. This makes the study of the genetics of specific indigenous groups essential to the understanding of the risk factors that may be present in the larger Mexican population, said Xavier Soberon, director of the Mexican National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN) who was not involved in the research.
It could also lead to personalized treatments for various Mexican ethnic groups and their mestizo families, said Ángeles Granados, a biochemist at the UNAM and a co-author of Gene paper [ElleétudiedéjàcommentleprofilgénétiqueuniquedelaMayapeutaccélérerletravaildecertainesenzymesconduisantàl'éliminationrapidedesmédicamentspourlediabètedeleurcorps"Celapourraitexpliqueraumoinsenpartiepourquoicertainsdiabétiquesnesontpasbienmédicamenteux"dit-elle
Understanding this process could help doctors know when to reduce or increase the doses of these drugs to their patients. It could also help Granados and other researchers to develop drugs that are resistant to breaking so quickly and, therefore, would be more effective for patients Maya, and for anyone else who shares this particular genetic variant.
But other scientists remain skeptical. "We can not start talking about improved treatments for Maya because diabetes is a complex disease involving many unknown risk factors, said Teresa Tusié Luna, a human geneticist who studies diabetes at the National Institute of health sciences and nutrition Salvador Zubiran in Mexico City. and all of these risk factors are genetic. Mexican genomes could not have changed in 20 years, but there are more cases of diabetes in the country today ' hui a few decades ago. This means that the modern lifestyle may have something to do with the increase, but Tusié Luna warns that we are just beginning to explore how both genetic and environmental components interact with each with others regarding diabetes.
Lorena Orozco, another human genetics at INMEGEN, concerned about the methodology used in the study. "It is difficult to associate the risk of diabetes because Maya that our sample sizes are still small, and that is an intrinsic problem of working with ethnic groups. " Does this mean that we should stop studying? "No," Orozco said, "we just have to be careful."
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