Five New Loci Associated with Asthma Found : Study
Asthma is a common lung condition that causes occasional breathing difficulties. It affects more than 300 million people worldwide including 10 to 20 percent of children. Characterized by clinical heterogeneity, it results from both genetic predisposition and exposure to environmental and lifestyle factors.
Researchers from Inserm and Paris Diderot University (France), the University of Chicago (USA), the National Heart and Lung Institute (UK) and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (USA) together with researchers of the Trans-National Asthma Genetics Consortium (TAGC) have now discovered five new regions of the genome that increase the risk of asthma in a major study.
The large scale involved more than 45 research groups from Europe, North America, Mexico, Australia, and Japan. Further, it pooled data on millions of DNA polymorphisms throughout the genome in more than 142,000 asthmatic and nonasthmatic subjects of European, African, Latino, and Japanese ancestry.
The meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies conducted in these ethnically diverse populations identified a total of 878 genetic variants belonging to 18 loci associated with asthma risk.
Another important element is the shared associations of variants with asthma, autoimmune diseases and diseases with an inflammatory component such as cardiovascular diseases, cancers, neuro-psychiatric diseases.
The
outcomes of this work open new avenues of research, with the goal of elucidating the biological mechanisms underlying asthma in relationship with environmental exposures and promoting the development of new therapies, note the researchers.“These results highlight the importance of large-scale genetic studies to better characterize complex diseases,” according to the scientists who come from Inserm and Paris Diderot University, the University of Chicago, the National Heart and Lung Institute (U.K.), and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “This study opens new avenues of research aiming at integrating genomic and epigenomic data together with environmental exposures in order to elucidate the physiopathological mechanisms underlying asthma and to promote the development of new therapies.”
