Refining the Genetic Contribution to Type 2 Diabetes Subtypes

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a complex and highly heterogeneous disease driven in part by genetic predisposition and can be stratified into clinical subgroups to aid disease management. We recently grouped T2D subjects in the Qatar Biobank (QBB) cohort into Severe Insulin-Deficient Diabetes (SIDD), Severe Insulin-Resistant Diabetes (SIRD), Mild Obesity-Related Diabetes (MOD) and Mild Age-Related Diabetes (MARD) subtypes. Herein, we focused on the genetic makeup of these subtypes.

We used the QBB cohort (n = 13,808), of whom 2687 were with T2D, and comprehensively assessed polygenic risk scores (PGS) across T2D subtypes, investigated genetic loci associated with each subtype by leveraging the most recent and largest GWAS for T2D, evaluated SNP associations across T2D genetic clusters, and identified protein interaction pathways associated with these distinct T2D subtypes.

MOD showed consistently lower PGS compared with other T2D subtypes across all tested scores. SIDD showed more associations with SNPs mapping to residual glycemic cluster compared with other T2D subtypes. The incremental analysis of PGS004838 demonstrated a high ΔAUC of 0.101 for SIDD and a moderate ΔAUC of 0.068 for SIRD, but not for MOD and MARD. Protein interaction analyses identified candidate subtype-associated gene networks linked to pathways related to glucose homeostasis in SIDD, insulin signalling and hepatic metabolism in SIRD, body fat distribution in MOD and vascular-related processes in MARD.

We found heterogeneous genetic architectures across clinically defined T2D subtypes in a Middle Eastern population. Our findings provide evidence supporting differential polygenic burden, subtype genetic associations and subtype-associated biological pathways across T2D subtypes. These observations support the utility of subtype-based genetic analyses for improving biological understanding of T2D heterogeneity.