Publications by authors named "S Hazelhurst"
Article Synopsis
- Invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) remains a serious global issue, particularly concerning non-vaccine serotypes, even after the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCV) in South Africa.
- The study analyzed over 3,000 IPD genomes from children between 2005-2020, observing a drop in incidence for vaccine-type bacteria in the late-PCV13 period, but some continued to pose a threat.
- Notably, non-vaccine serotypes showed rising drug resistance and lineage diversity, indicating the need for ongoing genomic surveillance to inform health policies and future vaccine developments.
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStructural variants are responsible for a large part of genomic variation between individuals and play a role in both common and rare diseases. Databases cataloguing structural variants notably do not represent the full spectrum of global diversity, particularly missing information from most African populations. To address this representation gap, we analysed 1,091 high-coverage African genomes, 545 of which are public data sets, and 546 which have been analysed for structural variants for the first time.
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.
Front Genet
May 2024
Article Synopsis
- 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.
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