WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 (Chinese media) -- An international team led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has identified genetic markers associated with ulcerative colitis, the journal Nature Genetics said Sunday.
The findings, published in the advance online edition of the journal, enable researchers to better understand the biological pathways involved in the disease and may lead to the development of new treatments.
Ulcerative colitis is a chronic, relapsing disorder that causes inflammation and ulceration in the inner lining of the rectum and large intestine. The most common symptoms are diarrhea and abdominal pain.
Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, another chronic gastrointestinal inflammatory disorder, are the two major forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
"IBD is most often diagnosed in the teenage years or early adulthood. While patients usually don't die from IBD, affected individuals live with its debilitating symptoms during the most productive years of their lives," said Dr. Richard H. Duerr, senior author of the study.
Researchers performed a genome-wide association study of hundreds of thousands of genetic markers using DNA samples from 1,052 individuals with ulcerative colitis and pre-existing data from 2,571 controls, all of European ancestry and residing in North America.
Several genetic markers on chromosomes 1p36 and 12q15 showed highly significant associations with ulcerative colitis, and the association evidence was replicated in independent European ancestry samples from North America and southern Italy.
"Through genetic mapping, we and our collaborators are successfully identifying regions of the genome that contain IBD genes," Duerr said.
"The next steps are to understand the functional significance of IBD-associated genetic variants, and then to develop new treatments that specifically target biological pathways implicated by the genetic discoveries," he added.
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