An emerging body of science has shown that both the variety and makeup of gut bacteria play a key role in the development of Type 2 diabetes. Now researchers have determined those factors might one day be used to diagnose diabetes — before symptoms appear.

The findings, based on a study of identical twins and published in the journal Genome Medicine, suggest that assessing “gut microbiota” — in ways similar to blood tests for cholesterol and blood sugar — could help to diagnose Type 2 diabetes early, Medical News Today reports. 

The research — by Curtis Huttenhower and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, and Seoul National University in South Korea  – has identified a series of Type 2 diabetes biomarkers, changes in gut microbiota, and genetics that point the way to new diagnostic methods for the metabolic disorder.

The study involved 20 healthy identical Korean twins aged 30-48 years, whose gut bacterial were sampled and examined over nearly a five-year period. Those who developed diabetes over the course of the study had strains of gut bacteria that were different from those who did not develop the disease, even though both sets of twins had the same types of intestinal microbes.

"It suggests that twins are initially colonized by the same bugs in infancy, due perhaps to shared environment or genetics and then retain those organisms long enough to begin to diverge through short-term evolution,” said Huttenhower. “If true, this can be studied directly in larger twin cohorts, and it would help us understand how the microbiome develops beyond diabetes alone in a wide variety of conditions."