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Diabetes Is Rising in Africa. Could It Lead to New Breakthroughs?
Growing rates of type 2 diabetes across the African content offer scientists hope of creating new, more inclusive treatments.
Segun Fatumo, a genetics professor at Queen Mary University of London who is currently leading studies of type 2 diabetes in Uganda and Malawi, says many of these patients are drug naïve, meaning their disease progression has yet to be altered by medication. The gene may therefore represent a potential new drug target, says Tinashe Chikowore, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School who is also leading studies of type 2 diabetes patients in the region. Earlier this year, the Lancet Global Health medical journal published a study of more than 6,500 middle-aged adults from four sub-Saharan African countries which found that, after family history, simply being male was one of the biggest predictors of type 2 diabetes risk.
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