ABSTRACT
Most common disorders that have a genetic component such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, common forms of cancer, most autoimmune diseases, and allergic diseases, including asthma, have both a genetic and an environmental component. It is now recognized that an underlying mechanism of disease common to these various disorders is inammation. Both environmental factors and multiple genes, each with modest contributions to the total variance in association with common diseases, are found universally in common diseases. Although the number of known mutations underlying complex traits is still relatively small, advances in genomics have greatly enhanced both genetic discovery and the analysis of genomic and epigenomic inuences on disease risk. The methods of linkage analysis and gene association studies have been enhanced with recent technological advances in genome mapping, sequencing, and analysis of individual variation. Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) and the use of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are being widely applied to research on chronic diseases using commercially available microarrays.
