Mayan ancestry may help explain the high risk of diabetes in Mexico
Mayan ancestry may help explain the high risk of diabetes in Mexico
By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega 5 June 2015 3:45 pm
Mexico has one of the highest rates of type 2 diabetes in the world, with 12% of the population suffering from the condition, compared with 9% of people in the United States. The Mexican government is so worried that it 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 at higher risk for developing diabetes, no matter how healthy their diets are. The reason may be their Maya ancestry, which carries with it genetic variations associated with the disease.
“This is an important finding, because it could provide us clues about how to tackle the disease and plan public health strategies,” especially for Maya-speaking people, says María Guadalupe García, a geneticist at the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY) in Mérida, who was not involved in the research.
There may be fewer Maya today than at the culture’s height 3000 years ago, but they never disappeared. Today, Maya-speaking people constitute the second largest indigenous group in Mexico, with 800,000 people living mainly in the Yucatán Peninsula in the country’s southeast. Isolated culturally and geographically from other ethnicities for thousands of years, the Maya gene pool grew smaller and more homogeneous. As tends to happen with any 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 wondered whether any of those variations might increase the Maya’s risk for diabetes, a growing problem in southeastern Mexico.
Menjívar’s team surfed through the genomes of 575 Maya individuals looking for 10 genetic variants that had been previously related to diabetes risk. They found that two are unusually common in the Maya, the researchers will report in next month’s issue of Gene.
More:
http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2015/06/mayan-ancestry-may-help-explain-high-risk-diabetes-mexico
Science:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/122839198
