Browsing by Subject "Susceptibility genes"

Endometriosis is a common complex disease that affects the quality of life of millions of women worldwide. It is characterized as an inflammatory condition where endometrium-like tissue is found at ectopic sites. The main symptoms are pain and infertility. There is no cure for the disease yet. Diagnosis requires surgery in most cases, the invasiveness is a problem. The costs for societies due to endometriosis are immense. Endometriosis, despite being a benign disease, shares characteristics with malignancies: invasion, proliferation, and angiogenesis. These enigmatic aspects make this disease an interesting subject for research. Endometriosis is shown to have a heritability of 50%. Research on the molecular genetic background is needed for the development of low-invasive diagnostic methods and better treatments for the disease. Genetic research has recently focused on genome-wide association studies of large patient and control cohorts. By design, these studies can only explain a portion of the low-risk genetic variants of common diseases. No causal high-risk gene defects behind endometriosis are found yet. In this study whole exome analysis is utilized for searching a heritable gene defect from a family of four closely related Finnish endometriosis patients in two generations. Two of the patients have a combined phenotype of endometriosis and ovarian or tubal carcinoma. Endometriosis is known to increase the risk for certain types of malignancies, endometriosis-associated ovarian cancers. Four candidate susceptibility genes for endometriosis were identified in this study FGFR4, NALCN, ZNFX1, and NAV2. The findings still need to be validated in patients not related to the study family. The variants found in this study lay a basis for screening additional endometriosis patients and functional analysis of the variants. Subsequent research on these found candidate susceptibility genes may elucidate the pathogenic pathways behind endometriosis or endometriosis-associated ovarian cancer in the future.