A Summary of 20 Years' Research

Asia Smolonska and her colleagues did a meta-analyses on suspected COPD genes, giving a summary of 20 years' research. Smolonska: We had a simple idea of summarizing as much of previous research on COPD genetics as possible. Shortly it turned out that this was not that simple...

Mainly because of confusion caused by inconsistent results published by different groups. Then we got the idea to put these results in order and determine weather association is present or not by performing meta-analyses on most frequently studied polymorphisms in candidate genes for COPD. Results we got were a bit surprising, as most of polymorphisms were not associated at all. One of the reasons for this is lack of sufficient number of studies. The more studies are combined in meta-analysis the more reliable is the result. Even more important is a number of cases and controls in each study, and many of them were small, therefore mostly were unable to detect the association, even if it was present. Our manuscript summarizes the 'era of candidate genes' in COPD and perhaps closes it. There are over 20 000 genes in human genome, looking for a few causing a disease among them with candidate gene approach is not effective, especially now, when tools for simultaneous investigation of all of them are available. The first genome-wide association study on COPD is done, but clearly more are needed to reveal genes making one susceptible to COPD and more are coming. Want to read more? See the abstract/full text of this article.

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