THURSDAY, July 7 (HealthDay News) -- Nine different gene loci are associated with Dupuytren's disease, six of which are involved in the Wnt-signaling pathway, according to a study published online July 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Guido H. Dolmans, M.D., from the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, and colleagues investigated the association between Dupuytren's disease and specific genetic markers in an initial genome-wide association study involving 960 patients with the disease and 3,117 controls. The 35 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) most strongly associated with Dupuytren's disease were tested in 1,365 patients with the disease and 8,445 controls.
The investigators found that there was a significant initial correlation between Dupuytren's disease and eight SNPs at three loci. Analysis of the data from all 2,325 patients with Dupuytren's disease and 11,562 controls showed a significant association between the disease and 11 SNPs at nine loci. Six of these nine loci contain genes which are part of the Wnt-signaling pathway: WNT4 (odds ratio [OR], 1.28), SFRP4 (OR, 1.98), WNT2 (OR, 0.83), RSPO2 (OR, 0.75), SULF1 (OR, 0.72) and WNT7B (OR, 1.54).
"Associations with variations in genes that encode proteins in the Wnt-signaling pathway suggest that aberrations in this pathway confer susceptibility to the disease," the authors write.
One author disclosed financial relationships with several pharmaceutical companies.
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