Novel Risk Factors for Type II Diabetes Mellitus and Coronary Heart Disease

Despite the huge advances made in the understanding of type II diabetes and coronary heart disease (CHD), these diseases still constitute a major health problem. Since the 1950s, epidemiologists focused on chronic disorders, including type II diabetes and CHD. Major aims of their research were to find predisposing factors and to reveal their pathophysiology. In the following decades, multiple traits and life-style behavioral factors were introduced and referred to as “risk factors”. The so called traditional risk factors could explain part of the diseased cases, but a proportion of cases remained unexplained. For instance, obesity was identified as a major risk factor for type II diabetes, but not all patients were overweight. Similarly, it was estimated that at least 50% of CHD events were not caused by the traditional CHD risk factors1. These observations together with the needs for widening our knowledge on the pathogenesis of type II diabetes and CHD and better accuracy of disease prediction, called for moving beyond the known risk factors. In this thesis, we made an attempt to further study two novel risk factors.

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