Study focuses on a gene that could decrease likelihood of developing alcoholic cirrhosis
Researchers have discovered how a person’s genes play a role in the possibility that they will suffer from alcoholic cirrhosis, as they discovered a gene that could make the disease less likely.
Alcoholic cirrhosis can happen after years of drinking too much alcohol.
According to the researchers, discovering more about this illness couldn’t come
at a more important time. The team describes its findings in a new paper
published in Hepatology.
“Based on US data, alcohol-associated liver disease is on the rise in terms of
the prevalence and incidents and it is happening more often in younger
patients,” said Suthat Liangpunsakul, MD, professor of medicine, dean’s scholar
in medical research for the Department of Medicine Division of Gastroenterology
and Hepatology, and one of the principal investigators of the study. “There’s a
real public health problem involving the consumption of alcohol and people
starting to drink at a younger age.”
The genomic Consortium was funded by the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse
and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institute of Health (NIH). This
genome-wide association study began several years ago and is one of the largest
studies related to alcoholic cirrhosis ever performed. DNA samples were taken
from over 1,700 patients from sites in the United States, several countries in
Europe and Australia and sent to IU School of Medicine where the team performed
the DNA isolation for genome analysis. The patients were divided into two
groups — one made up of heavy drinkers that never had a history of
alcohol-induced liver injury or liver disease and the second group of heavy
drinkers who did have alcoholic cirrhosis.
“Our key finding is a gene called Fas Associated Factor Family Member 2, or
FAF2,” said Tae-Hwi Schwantes-An, PhD, an assistant research professor of
medical and molecular genetics and the lead author of the study. “There’s this
convergence of findings now that are pointing to the genes involved in lipid
droplet organization pathway, and that seems to be one of the biological
reasoning of why certain people get the liver disease and why certain people do
not.”
The researchers are anticipating to study this gene more closely and looking at
its relationship to other, previously-discovered genes that can make a person
more likely to develop alcoholic cirrhosis.
“We know for a fact those genes are linked together in a biological process, so
the logical next step is to study how the changes in these genes alter the
function of that process, whether it’s less efficient in one group of people,
or maybe it’s inhibited in some way,” Schwantes-An said. “We don’t know exactly
what the biological underpinning of that is, but now we have a pretty
well-defined target where we can look at these variants and see how they relate
to alcoholic cirrhosis.”
As their research continues, the team hopes to eventually find a way to identify this genetic factor in patients with the goal of helping them prevent alcoholic cirrhosis in the future or developing targeted therapies that can help individuals in a more personalized way.
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