Redefining disease

It seems probable that for at least the rest of the 21st century, genotyping the human phenotypes will work to define “disease,” as researchers at Osaka University illustrate. “To achieve this, the team performed GWAS using BioBank Japan, which includes medical data from 180,000 people and is one of the largest non-European biobanks. This incorporated 220 health-related diseases and traits and made the study extremely diverse and comprehensive, particularly in Asian populations.  . . . .   The researchers then performed cross-population meta-analyses with the UK Biobank (United Kingdom) and FinnGen (Finland), which involved 628,000 individuals. This work helped identify over 14,000 genomic loci of phenotypic significance. Of these, 5,000 loci were novel discoveries.”  MORE

Image Credit:  EurekAlert.com