Crohn's Gene Identified in Children

Crohn's Disease is a very painful disorder related to the inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract. Pediatricians have recently uncovered a gene that could be responsible for raising the risk of a child generating this chronic disorder.

This find was published in the August addition of the journal Gut by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, which reaffirmed earlier research conducted by German researchers on the adult form of Crohn's Disease, in which they discovered the same gene.

Robert N. Baldassano, M.D., director of the Center for Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease at children's Hospital, responded to the study, saying that "...it's important to sort out specific genes and to replicate previous findings...there are different types of Crohn's Disease...classifying types by genetic profiles may help us select the most appropriate treatment for each patient."

The research was compiled by studying a control group of 282 children with a non-variant gene with 143 children with the variant genome. After the research was compiled and studied extensively, it was discovered that there existed a definite link between the variant genome and the presence of Crohn's Disease, as the children with the variant gene were approximately 62 percent more likely to generate Crohn's Disease than the children with the more common genome.

A separate test comparing the tested children with their parents- called a trio- solidified these findings and found an association between the ATG16L1 gene and Crohn's Disease. The Center for Applied Genomics at Children's Hospital was the facility used to carry out this extensive study, during which tools were used to analyze all of the patients' specific genotypes and study the differences between the control and test groups in order to find a link between the variation of the gene ATG16L1 and Crohn's Disease. His center, established in the summer 2006, has been taking on the largest genetic analysis projects in the world in an effort to discover findings such as this one.

Senior author Hakon Hakonarson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Applied Genomics recently worked with researchers in Montreal and identified a gene linked with diabetes in children as part of his mission to discover links between genomic anomalies and apply them to disorders and diseases in children, hopefully with the result of possible treatments being researched and applied to prevent these problems in the future.

Although researchers admit that the reasons for such genetic mutations are not clear to them, the study of such mutations is yielding results in the healthcare industry, such as the discovery of this gene variation link involved with Crohn's Disease in children.

Sources: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, URL (http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/07-18-2007/0004628081&EDATE )