As 2015 came to a close Professor Nick Wareham, Director of the MRC Epidemiology Unit, joined an multidisciplinary panel of experts in a PLoS Medicine editorial that took stock of the progress that had been made in medicine during the year, and the challenges that remain. In Professor Wareham discussed the continued rise in the global prevalence of diabetes, and asked if this rise can be halted:

our immediate public health goal should be to limit and ideally reverse the increase in the incidence of the condition, rather than to impact on the overall prevalence since this is likely to continue to rise in the future…there is no single intervention that can effect such population-level changes; instead, a wide range of different approaches are needed”

PLoS Medicine have since announced that their inaugural special monthly issue – planned for the summer of 2016 – will be on Diabetes Prevention, and have called for articles to be submitted by the deadline of Friday 4th March 2016.

Professor Wareham, and Professor William Herman, Director of the Michigan Center for Diabetes Translational Research, have been invited by PLoS Medicine to be guest editors for this special edition.

For the Diabetes Prevention Special Issue PLoS Medicine will consider laboratory, translational or clinical studies describing policy or practice insights into diabetes prevention, including randomised trials, significant observational studies, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, diagnostic/prognostic evaluations, modelling studies, cost-effectiveness analyses and natural experiments.

You can find more details about the type of articles they are looking for for the special issue, and the how to submit an article, in the PLoS Blogs post “The Future of Diabetes Prevention: A Call for Papers”.