Led by scientists from the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Health Research Institute of Asturias in Spain, and AstraZeneca, the study reveals that specific inherited genetic changes affect the likelihood of developing ’clonal haematopoiesis’, a common condition characterised by the development of expanding clones of multiplying blood cells in the body, driven by mutations in their DNA.
Although symptomless, the disorder becomes ubiquitous with age and is a risk factor for developing blood cancer and other age-related diseases. Its onset is a result of genetic changes in our blood-making cells.
‘Genome-wide analyses of 200,453 individuals yield new insights into the causes and consequences of clonal hematopoiesis’ by Kar SP et al. in Nature Genetics