RD Lawrence lecture 2013. Stratified approaches to the management of diabetes.

A stratified approach to medicine aims to identify subgroups of patients who should be managed differently from others. Diabetes is a condition that offers considerable potential for stratification, in areas of drug response, complication risk and rate of progression amongst others. Approaches to stratification can be simple, using clinical phenotyping, or more complex involving genomic and other '-omic' technologies. In this review, I will highlight the utility of measuring endogenous insulin production to aid in diagnosis and appropriate treatment; outline key advances in monogenic diabetes where determining genetic aetiology can result in dramatic changes in treatment, and describe the developments in the field of pharmacogenetics in Type 2 diabetes.