International team identifies 21 new genetic risk factors for Crohn...(an additional 3700 patients and matching...)

Both of those analyses strongly confirmed the 11 previously-identified sites and found an additional 21 areas associated with susceptibility to Crohn's. While the newly identified sites are not as strong as those found in earlier studies, they continue to build a picture of factors leading to the inappropriate immune-system activation that characterizes the disorder.

"It's amazing that all of the genes indentified in GWAS studies of Crohn's so far align with the pathways that we know are disrupted, systems that sense the presence of microbes and effectively clear them from the body." says Ramnik Xavier, MD, of the Center for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel Disease in the MGH Gastroenterology Unit and the MGH Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, a co-author of the Nature Genetics study. "Mapping the internal circuitry of these systems and identifying the molecular switches that control those circuits should lead to better targeted drugs for Crohn's and other inflammatory bowel diseases." Daly is an assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Xavier is an associate professor.

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