DNA methylation changes associated with type 2 diabetes and diabetic kidney disease in an East Asian population

Objective: There is growing body of evidence that epigenetic changes including DNA methylation influence the risk of type 2 diabetes and its microvascular complications. We conducted a methylome-wide association study (MWAS) to identify differentially methylated regions (DMRs) of type 2 diabetes and diabetic kidney disease (DKD) in Korean population.

Methods: We performed an initial MWAS in 232 participants in a case-control study design with type 2 diabetes and 197 non-diabetic controls with Illumina EPIC bead chip using peripheral blood leukocytes. Type 2 diabetes group was subdivided to 87 DKD cases and 80 non-DKD controls. Additional 819 individuals from two population-based cohorts were used to investigate the association of the identified DMRs with quantitative metabolic traits. We developed a DNA methylation score using identified DMRs to predict the occurrence of type 2 diabetes. To examine the causal relationship between the metabolic traits and differentially methylated sta...