Publications by authors named "P Romuald Boua"
Socio-economic status of participants in many public health, epidemiological, and genome-wide association studies is an important trait of interest. It is often used in these studies as a measure of direct interest or as a covariate. The Africa Wits INDEPTH Partnership for Genomic and Environmental Research (AWI-Gen) explores genomic and environmental factors in non-communicable diseases, particularly cardio-metabolic disease.
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- This study is the largest genome-wide association study (GWAS) focusing on urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) populations, involving nearly 18,000 participants.
- Researchers identified two significant genetic loci associated with UACR, one in residents of SSA and another in non-resident individuals of African ancestry.
- The findings highlight the limited transferability of polygenic scores across different populations, underscoring the importance of diverse genetic studies to understand kidney disease susceptibility in underrepresented groups.
Population studies are crucial in understanding the complex interplay between the gut microbiome and geographical, lifestyle, genetic, and environmental factors. However, populations from low- and middle-income countries, which represent ~84% of the world population, have been excluded from large-scale gut microbiome research. Here, we present the AWI-Gen 2 Microbiome Project, a cross-sectional gut microbiome study sampling 1,803 women from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenetic Association and Transferability for Urinary Albumin-Creatinine Ratio as a Marker of Kidney Disease in four Sub-Saharan African Populations and non-continental Individuals of African Ancestry.
medRxiv
April 2024
Article Synopsis
- * Researchers identified two significant genetic loci associated with urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) — one on chromosome 6 and another on chromosome 11 — while confirming links to previously known regions associated with UACR.
- * The findings highlight the genetic diversity in SSA populations and the limitations of polygenic scores from European ancestry studies, underscoring the need for more genetic research in diverse groups to better understand chronic kidney disease risk factors.
Most hypertension-related genome-wide association studies (GWASs) focus on non-African populations, despite hypertension (a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease) being highly prevalent in Africa. The AWI-Gen study GWAS meta-analysis for blood pressure (BP)-related traits (systolic and diastolic BP, pulse pressure, mean-arterial pressure and hypertension) from three sub-Saharan African geographic regions (N = 10,775), identifies two novel genome-wide significant signals (p < 5E-08): systolic BP near P2RY1 (rs77846204; intergenic variant, p = 4.95E-08) and pulse pressure near LINC01256 (rs80141533; intergenic variant, p = 1.
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