Montreal Heart Institute and Mount Sinai Hospital researchers contribute to Crohn's dis...( Twenty-one new genetic risk factors ...)

Twenty-one new genetic risk factors associated with Crohn's disease have been discovered, more than doubling the amount of genetic information about the disease. An international consortium of Crohn's disease researchers combined efforts, including major contributions from Canadian researchers Dr. John D. Rioux from Montreal Heart Institute and Universit de Montral and Drs. Mark Silverberg and Hillary Steinhart from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto to publish this breakthrough study in Nature Genetics.

"This greatly increases our knowledge of the genetic architecture of Crohn's and gives us more detailed insight into the biological underpinnings of the disease," says Mark J. Daly, PhD, of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Human Genetic Research and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the report's senior author.

In 2007, three studies compared the genomes of patients with Crohn's disease to those of healthy individuals a North American-based study, led by Dr. John D. Rioux PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine at the Montreal Heart Institute (MHI) and the Universit de Montral and director of the Laboratory in Genetic and Genomic Medicine at the MHI, and input from colleagues at five other institutions, including contributions from Dr. Mark Silverberg, Staff Gastroenterologist, Mount Sinai Hospital and Assistant Professor of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Toronto, and Dr. Hillary Steinhart, Chief of Gastroenterology, Mount Sinai Hospital; a U.K. study supported by the Wellcome Trust; and a study by a group of French and Belgian investigators identified a total number of Crohn's-associated genes to 11. Those explained only a small proportion of the heritability of Crohn's, which affects over a half a million people in the U.S and Canada.

The three teams combined their data in the current study that involved more than 3,200 Crohn's patients with more than 4,800 controls. This study not only confirm
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