the population. This explains the substantial overlap of the distribution of risk alleles among people who developed diabetes and those who remained disease-free, which makes it difficult to set a cut-off point of a gene count (or genetic risk function) that reliably discriminates later cases of type 2 diabetes. Although genetic tests for type 2 diabetes, based on a subset of the alleles studied here, can already be purchased in the commercial sector, our findings suggest that much more rigorous evaluation of their use as a health technology is needed before such tests should be adopted by healthcare organisations.
