Patients with moderate-to-severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and a history of frequent ‘attacks’ who were given a medicine called astegolimab reported an increase in health-related quality of life compared to those on a placebo, according to findings from a study published in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
Mandatory vaccinations not the answer to boosting uptake among NHS
Just one in six (18%) healthcare workers thought mandatory vaccinations were the best solution to encourage more frontline staff to have a Covid-19 jab, finds new research led by UCL and the University of Leicester.Read More
Leicester health researchers receive NIHR Senior Investigator status
A pair of Leicester health researchers have been awarded prestigious NIHR Senior Investigator awards to advance their work in emergency medicine and rehabilitation.
Managing chronic kidney disease with MyKidneys&Me
Being diagnosed with a long-term condition can be a very anxious time for many people. There are always lots of questions and concerns around how best to manage the condition. While healthcare teams can help a lot, managing conditions day-to-day at home and work can still be challenging. Researchers in Leicester are hoping to improve this situation for people with chronic kidney disease.Read More
How families are solving the mystery of a dangerous heart condition
Bicuspid aortic valve or BAV is the most common congenital heart condition and half of all people born with it end up needing open heart surgery. Yet many people don’t even know they have it.Read More
Video Transcript: Professor Sir Nilesh Samani, polygenic risk scores, current research and future directions
So in the last few years, how polygenic risk scores work and how much they quantify your risk has been established in many, many studies. The question is now how do we apply this in real life, what we’ve done is there are a number of studies going on. In Leicester we’ve done a study called GENVASC where over the last 9 years or so we’ve recruited over 40, 000 people who were attending a GP practice for an NHS health check, looking, as I mentioned earlier, where people’s blood pressure and so on is assessed.
What at last those patients do is provide us with an extra blood sample to look at their DNA. And what we hope this study will show is the value in adding this genetic information on top of the clinical assessment that is done. If we can show real value in a real life situation which is currently applied in the NHS, ie your health check, that it actually better identifies people who might be at risk of having a heart attack and therefore apply better prevention measures to those people, then I think the value of the polygenic risk score has been established in real life practice.
And hopefully that will then get adopted for use in the NHS and other health systems. Of course polygenic risk scores are not only applicable to heart disease and risk of heart attacks, but can be applied to the risk of various cancers including breast cancer so it’s a really exciting area of active research at the moment and particularly an area where you can see it’s translation into clinical practice coming in the next few years. It’s likely that all of us will have our DNA analysed in some way and it’ll be stored in our health record because the ability to assess DNA is becoming much cheaper and much more effective, so in the next decade or two I suspect we will have our genetic sequence in our records and then applying polygenic risk scores will become much easier.