Transcription Factor 7-Like 2 (TCF7L2) Polymorphism and Context-Specific Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in Tunisian Adults in a Comparison to African American and Caucasian Adults - Abstract
Background: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of TCF7L2 on T2D in a Tunisian population, in a comparison with African Americans and Caucasians, studied before by Yan et al.
Methods: We investigated the association between the TCF7L2 rs7903146 polymorphism and T2D in 464 Tunisian participants without diabetes who were inducted into the Atherosclerosis Risk and followed for 5 years.
Results: Compared with homozygous CC individuals, heterozygous CT and homozygous TT individuals had higher cumulative incidence of type 2 diabetes over 5 years of follow-up: 8.68% (95% CI 7.46?9.59) vs. 10.60% (9.29?11.38) and 12.49 (10.48?15.38) in Tunisians, respectively, and 11.3% (95% CI 10.2–12.4) vs. 21.1% (20.8 –21.4) and 27.9% (19.3–36.5) in African Americans, respectively, and 9.7% (8.8–10.6) vs. 11.3% (10.2–12.4) and 13.6% (11.1–16.1), respectively, in Caucasians. Individuals with the risk allele had the highest hazards of diabetes if they were obese and had low HDL cholesterol, followed by individuals with any one and none of the traits.
Conclusions: Our results describe the first significant evidence of association between the TCF7L2 rs7903146 polymorphism and type 2 diabetes risk in a Tunisian population, in a comparison with a comparative study between African Americans and Caucasians. We concluded that the diabetes risk carried by the rs7903146 risk allele is greatly increased in the context of some metabolic risk factors for type 2 diabetes. We also found that in that study, our findings on the Tunisian population are very close to the findings on the Caucasians.