Metabolic Signatures Associated with Type 2 Diabetes have been Identified

A group of researchers, mainly based in the Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, at the German Research Center for Environmental Health have identified a series of deregulated metabolites that are associated with diabetes. The study suggests that metabolic markers hold the potential to detect diabetes-related complications already under sub-clinical conditions in the general population.
The research used a mixture of techniques including Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and tandem mass spectrometry on 40 individuals with self-reported diabetes and 60 controls (male, over 54 years) that were randomly selected from the participants of the population-based KORA (Cooperative Health Research in the Region of Augsburg) study, representing an extensively phenotyped sample of the general German population.

The article, entitled ' Metabolic Footprint of Diabetes: A Multiplatform Metabolomics Study in an Epidemiological Setting' is freely available through PLoS ONE.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013953