Our findings suggest a shared genetic risk for type 2 diabetes and its kidney complications, and a potential role for WFS1 in early-onset diabetic nephropathy in American Indian populations.
Examination of the publicly available Diabetes Genetics Initiative genome-wide association dataset revealed that rs10012946, which is in strong linkage disequilibrium with the three WFS1 SNPs (r(2)=0.88-1.0), was associated with type 2 diabetes (allelic odds ratio 0.85, 95% CI 0.75-0.97, p=0.026).
Although the connection between loss of function mutations of the WFS1 gene and DIDMOAD-syndrome including diabetes mellitus underpins the significance of wolframin in the pathogenesis, exact role of WFS1 polymorphic variants in the development of type 1 and type 2 diabetes has not been discovered yet.
We examined the effect of interactions between seven incretin-related genetic variants in GIPR, KCNQ1, TCF7L2 and WFS1 and dietary components (whey-containing dairy, cereal fibre, coffee and olive oil) on the risk of type 2 diabetes in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-InterAct study.
At six loci with genome-wide evidence for T2D association (AP3S2, KCNK16, NOTCH2, SCL30A8, VPS26A, and WFS1) predicted mRNA target sites for islet-expressed miRNAs overlapped potentially causal variants.
Rare mutations in WFS1 cause Wolfram syndrome; using a gene-centric approach, we show that variation in WFS1 also predisposes to common type 2 diabetes.
In addition, we found evidence for association of SNPs in the genes PPARG, IGF2BP2, HHEX, TCF7L2, and FTO with type 2 diabetes in the same directions as previously described (p<0.05), but not for WFS1, CDKN2A/B, KCNJ11, or EXT2.
We could show that 12 (57%) (HHEX, HNF1B, IGF2BP2, IRS1, KCNJ11, KCNQ1, NOTCH2, PPARG, TCF7L2, THADA, TSPAN8 and WFS1) out of 21 genes located in vicinity of these SNPs were showing aberrant expression in T2DM from the gene expression profiling studies.