ENDOCRINOLOGY
Making Associations continued
“ It’ s not just that most of them have some complications. It’ s that quite a few of them have a lot. And they’ re young.”
PHIL ZEITLER, MD, PHD
TODAY2 sought out the raw information for answering those questions in part through a structured interview conducted with participants every six months. They asked about encounters with community medical care and sought records. They asked about medications and whether participants could afford to take them regularly. They asked if participants were working, if their parents were working, where they were living, how many other people were living in the home.
For its five years, TODAY2 also partnered with another major diabetes study, SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth, led by Dana Dabelea, MD, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Colorado School of Public Health on the Anschutz Medical Campus. SEARCH administered the same interview to its own participants, youth with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. That effectively doubles TODAY2’ s data and adds a basis for comparison with type 1 diabetes.
Many more partnerships are in the pipeline. As part of the Progress in Diabetes Genetics in Youth( ProDiGY) Consortium, the first genetic study of youth-onset type 2 diabetes, the TODAY Group is collaborating with SEARCH and another large study known as T2D-GENES to analyze around 10 million imputed variants in more than 3,000 young people with type 2 diabetes, along with 6,000 adult controls( 4).
PHIL ZEITLER, MD, PHD
Medical Director, Clinical & Translational Research Center Section Head, Endocrinology Children’ s Hospital Colorado
Professor-Pediatrics, Endocrinology University of Colorado School of Medicine
PETTER BJORNSTAD, MD
Pediatric endocrinologist Children’ s Hospital Colorado
Assistant Professor, Pediatrics- Endocrinology University of Colorado School of Medicine
They’ re also collaborating with DCCT / EDIC, a study that began
in the 1970s and whose participants are now reaching their 60s, which will provide high-density, long-term data on the outcomes of people who were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in their teens. And they’ re comparing data with the Diabetes Prevention Program, which studied the feasibility of using metformin and lifestyle medicine to prevent diabetes in adults. It continued to follow participants who did develop diabetes in much the same way TODAY2 did. The comparison will go a long way toward
8 | CHILDREN’ S HOSPITAL COLORADO