Maggie CY Ng
Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Diabetes Metab
Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) is a major health problem aff ecting more than 24 million people in the United States. Th e highest prevalence is found in African Americans (13%), about double of that in European Americans. T2DM is characterized by the presence of insulin resistance and pancreatic _-cell dysfunction, resulted from the interaction of genetic and environmental factors. Recent advance in technologies and studies using genome-wide association (GWA) and meta-analyses approaches have led to great success in the identifi cation of more than 40 loci associated with T2DM primarily in European-derived populations. Until recently, comparable studies in African Americans are lacking due to the challenges of their admixed genome derived from African and European ancestries and lower degree of linkage disequilibrium. In addition to diff erences in genetic background, environmental risk factors, body composition, insulin secretion and resistance patterns may aff ect the relative contribution of genetic variants on T2DM susceptibility in diff erent populations. Th is talk will discuss recent works and challenges of GWA studies in African Americans as well as the opportunities to use African American populations to fi ne map known and identify novel loci for T2DM.
Dr. Maggie Ng completed her Ph.D. at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She started to work on genetics of type 2 diabetes in Chinese as postdoctoral fellow and faculty in the Chinese University, with a period of training at the University of Chicago. Currently, she is the Assistant Professor at the Center for Diabetes Research at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, focusing of diabetes and obesity genetic studies in African Americans.
