A new study has identified genetic risks for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a condition which affects about 200 million people worldwide and can result in blindness.
For the study, a team of scientists worked with a large biobank of veterans recruited at more than 60 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centres across the US to examine demographic, lifestyle, clinical and genetic risk profiles for AMD.
Their study focused on more than 287,000 veterans enrolled in MVP and integrated findings with results from several other independent biobanks to define the largest study of genetic risk for AMD and the first to include populations of diverse ancestry.
“An important aspect of our study is the inclusion of veterans of African or Hispanic ancestry in the MVP—groups that have not been well-studied in prior genetic studies of AMD,” said Sudha Iyengar, a professor and vice chair of research in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
“This diverse population is a unique resource to identify clues to develop therapeutics for AMD, a condition for which few effective treatments are available.”
The collective human genome shared by all ancestral groups worldwide contains discrete signatures for higher AMD risk in those of European descent, compared to those of African or Hispanic ancestry.
“By increasing the size of the study population, the research provided additional information to identify genetic markers with more modest but potentially important biological contributions to the likelihood that an individual will—or won’t—develop AMD,” Sudha said.
“The study also found an increased number of genes linked to AMD, from 34 that were identified previously, to 60.”
They also confirmed earlier beliefs that a history of smoking or alcohol use increases the likelihood of developing AMD. Although about 90 per cent of the MVP are male enrollees, the researchers were able to confirm prior observations that women are more susceptible to AMD than men.