Diabetes And DNA

When taken as a whole, there is considerable indirect evidence that aberrant DNA methylation plays a role in the development of type 2 diabetes. Two mechanisms are likely to contribute to the pathogenesis: First, imprinting of feedback loops in insulin target tissues such as adipose, muscle tissue and liver. DNA methylation has been shown to function as a cellular memory, and it provides the major mechanism by which expression patterns and response to stimuli can become heritable over many cell generations. In many cell types, expression patterns and differentiation pathways are "locked" at a certain time point. Second, untargeted DNA methylation errors, e.g., hypomethylation changes associated with decreased levels of the methyl group donor SAM, have been shown to accumulate with increasing age�this could account for the increasing incidence of type 2 diabetes in older individuals.