The number of individuals being overweight has increased alongside those being diagnosed with diabetes mellitus dramatically in the past 20 years. Early onset type 2 diabetes has been shown to be more aggressive and to accelerate cardiovascular complications. With more people having diabetes it is important to get a better understanding of risk factors and their link with disease in order to develop appropriate risk mitigation strategies alongside better tools to quantify outcome probabilities.
Our project is focussed to get a better understanding of environmental, lifestyle and patient characteristics of those with early onset type two diabetes compared to healthy individuals and those with “late” onset type two diabetes. This is important as current screening programmes and clinical management guidelines have been developed based on knowledge derived predominantly form late onset type two diabetes outcomes. We will also look at ethnicity and deprivation indices as the UK population has been changing over time and many clinical outcome parameter developed on Caucasian samples do not apply to those of other ethnicities: for example, body mass index cut offs in respect to diabetes risk are too high for those of an Asian background.
