Out in Nature this week is a paper by three Genomes Unzipped authors reporting 71 new genetic associations with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). This breaks the record for the largest number of associations for any common disease, and includes many new and interesting biological insights that you should all go and read about in the paper itself (pay-to-access I’m afraid) or on the Sanger Institute’s website.
One thing that we did not discuss in the paper was genetic prediction of IBD (i.e. using the risk variants we have discovered to predict who will or will not develop the disease). In this post I want to outline some of the situations in which we have considered using genetic risk prediction of IBD, and discuss whether any of them would actually work in practice.
