Publications by authors named "Cristina Rodriguez-Fontenla"

Article Synopsis
  • Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) affects about 1% of people and has a strong genetic component, but previous studies have not fully explained its genetic causes or biological mechanisms.
  • A large genome-wide association study (GWAS) analyzed data from over 53,000 OCD cases and over 2 million control participants, identifying 30 significant genetic markers related to OCD and suggesting a 6.7% heritability from SNPs.
  • The research also found 249 candidate risk genes linked to OCD, particularly in specific brain regions, and showed genetic correlations with various psychiatric disorders, laying the groundwork for further studies and potential treatments.
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Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder that may significantly impact on the affected individual's life. Common variation (SNPs) could explain about 50% of ASD heritability. Despite this fact and the large size of the last GWAS meta-analysis, it is believed that hundreds of risk genes in ASD have yet to be discovered.

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De novo mutations (DNMs), including germinal and postzygotic mutations (PZMs), are a strong source of causality for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, the biological processes involved behind them remain unexplored. Our aim was to detect DNMs (germinal and PZMs) in a Spanish ASD cohort (360 trios) and to explore their role across different biological hierarchies (gene, biological pathway, cell and brain areas) using bioinformatic approaches.

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Article Synopsis
  • There is significant variability in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), raising doubts about whether they should be treated as a single category.
  • A study analyzed genetic data from individuals with Asperger syndrome (AS) compared to other ASD subtypes, finding that AS has more genetic links to conditions like schizophrenia, ADHD, and major depression.
  • Results indicated that certain psychiatric disorders strongly overlap with AS, showing that AS might share genetic risks that are less prevalent in other ASD types, particularly through the use of advanced genetic analysis techniques.
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Background: Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) which may significantly impact on the affected individual's life. ADHD is acknowledged to have a high heritability component (70-80%). Recently, a meta-analysis of GWAS (Genome Wide Association Studies) has demonstrated the association of several independent loci.

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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by its significant social impact and high heritability. The latest meta-analysis of ASD GWAS () has revealed the association of several SNPs that were replicated in additional sets of independent samples. However, summary statistics from GWAS can be used to perform a gene-based analysis (GBA).

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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) defined by impairments in social communication and social interactions, accompanied by repetitive behavior and restricted interests. ASD is characterized by its clinical and etiological heterogeneity, which makes it difficult to elucidate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying its pathogenesis. Recently, mutations (DNMs) have been recognized as strong source of genetic causality.

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Objectives: Osteoarthritis (OA) is a joint disease common in the elderly. There is a prior functional evidence for different matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), such as MMP8 and MMP9, having a role in the breakdown of cartilage extracellular matrix in OA. Thus, we analyzed whether the common genetic variants of MMP8 and MMP9 contribute to the risk of OA.

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Osteoarthritis (OA) is a complex disease caused by the interaction of multiple genetic and environmental factors. This review focuses on the studies that have contributed to the discovery of genetic susceptibility factors in OA. The most relevant associations discovered until now are discussed in detail: GDF-5, 7q22 locus, MCF2L, DOT1L, NCOA3 and also some important findings from the arcOGEN study.

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Background: Some association studies, as the implemented in VEGAS, ALIGATOR, i-GSEA4GWAS, GSA-SNP and other software tools, use genes as the unit of analysis. These genes include the coding sequence plus flanking sequences. Polymorphisms in the flanking sequences are of interest because they involve cis-regulatory elements or they inform on untyped genetic variants trough linkage disequilibrium.

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Objective: To assess candidate genes for association with osteoarthritis (OA) and identify promising genetic factors and, secondarily, to assess the candidate gene approach in OA.

Methods: A total of 199 candidate genes for association with OA were identified using Human Genome Epidemiology (HuGE) Navigator. All of their single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with an allele frequency of >5% were assessed by fixed-effects meta-analysis of 9 genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that included 5,636 patients with knee OA and 16,972 control subjects and 4,349 patients with hip OA and 17,836 control subjects of European ancestry.

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Objectives: Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common form of arthritis with a clear genetic component. To identify novel loci associated with hip OA we performed a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on European subjects.

Methods: We performed a two-stage meta-analysis on more than 78,000 participants.

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Introduction: We aimed to explore the involvement of a multiallelic functional polymorphism in knee osteoarthritis (OA) susceptibility as a prototype of possible genetic factors escaping GWAS detection.

Methods: OA patients and controls from three European populations (Greece, Spain and the UK) adding up to 1003 patients (716 women, 287 men) that had undergone total knee joint replacement (TKR) due to severe primary OA and 1543 controls (758 women, 785 men) lacking clinical signs or symptoms of OA were genotyped for the D6S1276 microsatellite in intron 1 of BMP5. Genotype and mutiallelic trend tests were used to compare cases and controls.

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To test whether a higher genetic risk load for knee osteoarthritis (OA) is associated with an earlier age at symptom onset. Six polymorphisms in GDF5, PTGS2, 7q22 locus, DVWA, DIO3, and ASPN that have been associated with knee OA were analyzed in 255 patients that had undergone total knee replacement (TKR) because of primary OA and in 457 healthy controls. We looked for association between the number of risk alleles in each patient and his age at symptom onset with linear regression and t-tests between the upper and lower quartiles.

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Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common disease that has a definite genetic component. Only a few OA susceptibility genes that have definite functional evidence and replication of association have been reported, however. Through a genome-wide association study and a replication using a total of approximately 4,800 Japanese subjects, we identified two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (rs7775228 and rs10947262) associated with susceptibility to knee OA.

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