PhD students participating in August Krogh seminars receive 0,2 ECTS per seminar
AKC Double Seminar: Diabetes among Greenland Inuit. The genetic perspective
August Krogh Club Double Seminar
Professor Torben Hansen
14:00-15:00: Marit Eika Jørgensen: "Diabetes among Greenland Inuit. The epidemiological perspective"
15:00-16:00: Torben Hansen: "Diabetes among Greenland Inuit. The genetic perspective”
16:00-17:00: Post seminar servings and socializing.
Diabetes among Greenland Inuit. The genetic perspective
v/ Professor Torben Hansen, Director of the Programme Human Genomics and Metagenomics in Metabolism at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Research profil
Torben Hansen is Professor of Molecular Metabolism and Director of the Programme Human Genomics and Metagenomics in Metabolism at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Dr Hansen’s major research interests are the pathophysiology and pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes, obesity and the metabolic syndrome, and the identification of genetic determinants for both mono and polygenic components of diabetes and obesity. Furthermore, his recent research is also focused on the impact of the gut and saliva microbiome on disease and health and the crosstalk between the host genome and the microbiome.
Dr Hansen is Head of The Graduate PhD Programme for Basic Metabolic Research at University of Copenhagen and is involved in pre- and postgraduate educational activities at the Universities of Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense, and at the Steno Education Center Copenhagen. He has published more than 500 peer-reviewed original scientific articles and he has been cited more than 39,000 times and holds a H-factor of 80 according to web of science.
About the seminars
Indigenous people worldwide are in the middle of a social, demographic and cultural transition, which through changes in life style and living conditions results in an epidemiological transition. Inuit are a historically isolated indigenous population, for which both information about the genetic population structure, social transition and the disease pattern is exceptionally good and it is therefore ideal to study the consequences of the social transition on the changing disease pattern in this population.
While studies of Greenland Inuit before the 1980s found a low prevalence of type 2 diabetes (T2D) compared to Western populations, two recent population studies among more than 4000 Greenland Inuit found a notably high prevalence of T2D (9%) and pre-diabetes (19%) in the adult population.
We previously identified a loss-of-function variant in TBC1D4 segregating at high frequency in the Greenlandic population displaying a high impact on risk of type 2 diabetes, and recently we discovered a loss-of-function variant in adenylate cyclase 3 (ADCY3) that strongly associates with obesity and type 2 diabetes.
The observed effect sizes are several times larger than any previous findings in large-scale genome-wide association studies, confirming the advantage of studying the Greenlandic population due to its extreme demographic history, which allows for the existence of common variations that are rare or absent elsewhere.
Venue
Auditorium 1, August Krogh Building, Universitetsparken 13, DK-2100 Copenhagen
Registration
Participation is free, but please register here.
For PhD students
PhD students participating in August Krogh seminars receive 0,2 ECTS per seminar
Contact
Jonas Møller Kristensen, jmkristensen@nexs.ku.dk
