IBD risk increases among first-degree relatives
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Risk for developing inflammatory bowel disease was increased among first-degree relatives of individuals who already had the disease, according to study results.
Hyeong Sik Ahn, of the department of preventive medicine at Korea University, and colleagues wrote that family history is among the strongest risk factors for incident IBD. However, its impact is not fully understood worldwide.
“True population-based studies quantifying precise risk estimates of familial IBD incidence are limited, with none available in non-Western populations,” they wrote. “However, there are now convincing data demonstrating differences in non-genetic and genetic disease determinants based on geography and ethnic origin, with the majority of data comparing Western vs. Asian-Pacific populations.”
Researchers analyzed data from the South Korea National Health Insurance database to collect full first-degree relative (FDR) and IBD diagnoses from 2002 to 2017. They created a cohort of more than 21 million study individuals from 12 million different families.
Investigators calculated incidence risk ratios for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease in individuals of affected FDRs compared with individuals without affected FDRs.
Overall, 3.8% of patients with UC and 3.1% of patients with CD represented familial cases. In UC, there was a 10.2-fold (95% CI, 9.39–11.1) higher adjusted risk among FDRs of individuals with vs. without IBD. In CD, the increased adjusted risk was 22.1-fold (95% CI, 20.5–24.5).
Familial risk was higher between siblings than between parents and offspring, and the risk was highest among twins. The familial risk also increased as the number of affected FDRs went up.
“Studies conducted among other populations, particularly other Asian-Pacific populations will be informative for better understanding patterns of IBD risk that are shared vs. divergent between populations, which might provide clues for predisposing or risk attenuating determinants,” Ahn and colleagues wrote. “In tandem, studies specifically designed to identify the etiologies for these observations, which may plausibly relate to shared environmental exposures on the background of shared genetic susceptibility, are direly needed in the face of the expanding global burden of IBD.”
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts