Various academic organizations, countries, and regions have established different concepts of metabolic syndrome, including the involvement of metabolic disorders, the threshold of its constituent elements,and the utility as a research or clinical tool, etc. Additionally, uncertainty of its pathogenesis, lack of uniform diagnosis definition, and some other factors lead to concept confusion and practical inconvenience of metabolic syndrome in public health prevention and in clinical diagnosis. Consensus and controversy of metabolic syndrome were both presented in recent years. Besides literature reviewing, further evidences are essential for appropriate understanding and distinguishing. The present article mainly introduces the new controversies concerning the concept of metabolic syndrome and the recent evidence of unifying trends in the diagnosis criteria of abdominal obesity in Asians.

The laboratory measurements for the diabetes mellitus are widely used in medical practice.The laboratory measurements should be accuracy and valuable for clinician.The "Recommendations for Laboratory Analysis in the Diagnosis and Management of Diabetes Mellitus"would be helpful for laboratorian and clinician in the diabetes care.

There is a close relationship between visceral adipose tissue and metabolic syndrome. It is necessary to enhance the researches on the inaccordance between the adipocytes of various depots and to elucidate the distinct differences between visceral and subcutaneous adipocytes in terms of their receptors, adipokines and activity of enzymes.

The deficiency in islet ?-cell secretion and (or) the decrease in insulin sensitivity of target tissue are the important pathophysiological mechanisms of diabetes. The methods for the assessment and evaluation of ?-cell function can be divided into: pulsatile insulin secretion, glucose secretagogues, non-glucose secretagogues (phase, peak value and duration) and other secretions. While the suitable method was chosen for the evaluation of ?-cell function, the sensitivity and specificity of different methods in the natural history of diabetes and the objective of evaluation should be all taken into account.

Normally, pancreatic islet?-cell mass is regulated by?-cell replication, neogenesis, apoptosis and cell size.?-cell mass in diabetic patients is conspicuously less than that in normal persons. Decline of?-cell mass is mainly caused by increased?-cell apoptosis. The change of?-cell mass is clinically becoming more and more important in regard to the progression of diabetes mellitus.

Diabetes is a non-infectious disease which threatens public health and imposes a heavy burden to the society.Prevention and control of diabetes and its complications are currently urgent tasks in China.The experts in Shanghai are dedieated to making all-round and multi-angle studies on diabetes and have achieved series of progress and have published more than 145 papers within one year.

Type 2 diabetes is a polygenic and complex disease.Various approaches, including association analysis, positional cloning, positional candidate gene approach and genome-wide association analysis, were used to identify its susceptible genes.This article summarized the recent findings on susceptible gene mapping of type 2 diabetes.

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disease with complications associated with long-term damage,dysfunction,and failure of various organs,and has become one of the leading causes of impairment of human health.At present,the prevalence of diabetes mellitus reaches 9.7%in China,which is considered one of the countries in the world with heavy diabetes burden.Patients with established diabetic complications will be at higher risk of poor health outcomes and with higsh healthcare costs.These realities support the critical need to identify diabetes and its precursors more efficiently and earlier.The current diagnostic criteria,fasting plasma glucose(FPG),and oral glucose tolerance test(OGYT),that require fasting and multiple blood samplings,may not be acceptable to patients and may limit the clinical application so as to impede the effort to diagnose diabetes in timely fashion.HbA1C,which accurately reflects longer term glycaemia,Can be done at any time without fasting or other preparation of the patient and may not be affected by short term lifestyle changes.Given the recognized need,some panels have been considering the possible utility of HbA1C as a supplementary screening tool to make the diagnosis of diabetes efficiently.

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disease caused by both genetic and environmental factors, it has a significant association with lifestyle. This paper mainly discusses the effects of diet, sleep, smoking,physical exercise, and lifestyle intervention that interact with genetics on diabetes.

Pharmacogenomics aims to identify the effects of genomie variants on drug efficacy and safety. This article summarized the progress of pharmacogenomic study on anti-diabetic drugs.