PLoS medicine
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Comment Review
How important is diabetes as a risk factor for cardiovascular and other diseases in older adults?
Patel and Kengne discuss a new study inPLoS Medicine which found a 2-fold increased risk of cardiovascular death associated with diabetes in people over 65 years old.
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A limited number of studies have assessed the risk of common diseases when combining information from several predisposing polymorphisms. In most cases, individual polymorphisms only moderately increase risk (approximately 20%), and they are thought to be unhelpful in assessing individuals' risk clinically. The value of analyzing multiple alleles simultaneously is not well studied. This is often because, for any given disease, very few common risk alleles have been confirmed. ⋯ Combining information from several known common risk polymorphisms allows the identification of population subgroups with markedly differing risks of developing type 2 diabetes compared to those obtained using single polymorphisms. This approach may have a role in future preventative measures for common, polygenic diseases.