RESEARCHERS IN Britain have discovered a marker in the blood that can predict type 2 diabetes and also identify diabetics that are likely to develop cardiovascular disease as a result.
This was the first test of its kind and would be a valuable diagnostic tool for doctors who treat the disease, said lead researcher Dr Manuel Mayr of King’s College London.
“Diabetes is on the rise and currently 250 million worldwide have diabetes,” he said on the final day of the annual British Science Festival in Birmingham.
Those with the disease had a two to five times higher risk of heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases, and 15 per cent of heart attacks in western Europe occurred in patients with diabetes.
The test measures levels of a biochemical in the body known as microRNA-126. MicroRNAs help regulate many processes in the body and help to modulate the release of other important substances by the genes.
The marker is released by cells that line the blood vessels and levels in the blood drop by up to half if the person has diabetes, Dr Mayr said. It was more sensitive than the best existing tests for the disease and the levels of microRNA-126 were also predictive of the risk of cardiovascular disease.
It was not enough simply to know whether you had diabetes, you also needed to know your risk of heart disease, he said. “Because diabetes is such a health burden we need to know which patients are likely to succumb to the disease.” This was also the first time that microRNA-126 levels had been assessed in a population, with the study involving 800 subjects.
The large sample allowed the research team to make direct comparisons between levels of the marker and heart disease.
Dr Mayr believed the research would deliver a cheap, accurate tool for identifying the presence of type 2 diabetes and also open up the possibility of new treatments based on regulating microRNA-126 levels.
