Leading article
Genetics of ulcerative colitis: the come-back of interleukin 10
1 Department of Gastroenterology, CHU of Liège, University of Liège, Belgium
2 GIGA Research, University of Liège, Belgium
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to Dr Edouard Louis, Department of Gastroenterology, CHU of Liège, 4000 Liège, Belgium; Edouard.louis@ulg.ac.be
Revised version received 27 April 2009
Accepted 28 April 2009
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are chronic, immune-mediated inflammatory diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, affecting up to 0.4% of the population in Western countries.1 They are considered complex multifactorial polygenic diseases. While dramatic progress has been made in deciphering the genetic architecture of Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis was somewhat left behind, with virtually no relevant studies published until very recently. Although both disorders are considered to belong to the same spectrum of pathologies, the first gene clearly associated with Crohn’s disease (CARD-15)2 3 did not seem to predispose to ulcerative colitis in any cohort in which it was tested. This finding highlighted some pathogenic differences between the two diseases, and reminded geneticists working on inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) of the more modest contribution of genetics to the predisposition to ulcerative colitis, reflected in a lower ratio of disease concordance between monozygotic and dizygotic twins.4 The lower heritability of ulcerative
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