中文摘要：

流行病学是现代医学的一门重要的基础学科，也是一门应用广泛的应用学科。流行病学作为方法学在复杂疾病研究中有不可替代的作用。糖尿病具有复杂疾病属性，应该以系统的多层次的流行病学方法为研究策略。本文从流行病学与临床医学、遗传学及分子生物学交叉所形成的分支学科一临床流行病学、遗传流行病学及分子流行病学三个方面对糖尿病的研究进展作一综述，并从分子遗传学角度列举了部分糖尿病的候选基因。提出糖尿病的研究应该从宏观流行病学（如社会环境等因素的影响）和微观流行病学（如分子遗传等）结合系统地进行研究。

英文摘要：

Epidemiology is not only an important basic subject but also a wide range of applied science in area of modem medicine. As a methodology, Epidemiology has an irreplaceable role in the research of complex diseases. With a complex disease property, DM should be studied with systemic and multi-level epidemiological methods. In this article, we systematically reviewed the studying works on DM from the 3 aspects of clinical epidemiology, genetic epidemiology and molecular epidemiology, which branched from clinical medicine, genetics and molecular biology respectively, the candidate genes of DM were also enumerated in the aspect of molecular genetics. We proposed that DM should be systematically explored with the methods of combining the macro-epidemiology （influences come from the society and environment） and micro-epidemiology （molecular genetics）.