A Genetic research in functional dyspepsia: The FunDysGWAS study

A heritable component of functional dyspepsia (FD) has been demonstrated in cohorts of patients and community-based studies. However, genetic studies of FD have thus far been very scarce and mostly limited to candidate genes in small sample sets of cases and controls, hence no unequivocal FD risk locus has been proposed. Opposite to most human complex diseases, powered large-scale gene-hunting efforts and hypothesis-free genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been completely lacking in FD, which represents some sort of “neglected disorder” in terms of genetic research.
The current FunDysGWAS proposal aims to study the genotype of fully characterized FD patients in different European countries. This study could contribute to key insight into the genetic predisposition of functional dyspepsia. This will also allow later in depth analyses of the potential effect of FD risk genes on associated intermediate phenotypes (endophenotypes)  key to symptom generation.