APOB and type 2 diabetes mellitus: Of note, a recent GWAS report described that only a very small fraction of LDL-C lowering genetic variants (only 5 out of 113 variants from 90 distinct loci) were associated with type 2 diabetes.48 None of these were in PCSK9, APOB, or LDLR. However, a lack of pleiotropic effects in a subset of variants does not exclude the possibility of pleiotropic effects for other variants in the studied genes or in other ethnic backgrounds.