Study discovers new measures to predict risk of bowel diseases

Mount Sinai researchers claim to have discovered new measures to predict risk for inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
The study published in the research journal Gastroenterology shows that the polygenic risk scores, built using association data from multiple populations in Mount Sinai’s multi-ethnic BioMe Biobank, maximized IBD predictions for every population in the biobank.
BioMe is a system-wide effort at Mount Sinai that is revolutionizing diagnosis and classification of diseases according to the patient’s molecular profile.
The study showed that risk scores calculated from integrating data significantly improved predictions among individuals with European, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Hispanic ancestry in BioMe, as well as European individuals in the UK Biobank, which contains biological and medical data on half a million people between ages 40 and 69 living in the UK.
Predictive power was lower for patients with African ancestry, likely due to substantially smaller reference datasets and substantially greater genetic diversity within populations of African descent.
“The ability to accurately predict genetic disease risk in individuals across ancestries is a critical avenue that may positively affect patient outcomes, as early interventions and even preventive measures are being considered and developed,” said the study’s senior author Judy H. Cho, MD, Dean of Translational Genetics and Director of The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. (ANI)