Approved research

Elucidating factors underlying susceptibility to, and progression of, inflammatory bowel disease risk

Lay summary

Genetic variation has almost unique ability within biology to separate causal effects from those that are simply correlated. This is because the genome sequence is established at conception and remains almost entire stable throughout life, unperturbed by changes in the environment. To date, over 240 regions of the human genome have been unequivocally associated with risk of inflammatory bowel disease, a severe inflammatory disease of the gastrointestinal tract that affects 0.5% of the UK population. Due to the onset of the disease being relatively early on in life (typically late teens, early twenties) and the lack of an effective medical intervention for this chronic disease, the financial burden to NHS is estimated to be around £720 million per annum.