The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches.
The machine could help unravel the genetic basis of many complex diseases, including diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and some cancers.
Adds Glass: "The brain studies suggest that this could be a very valuable approach for approaching many complex diseases going forward".
The occurrence and development of many complex diseases are associated with various molecules, whose contents are rarely in the early stage of the disease.
The benefits of these new approaches can be observed in many complex diseases, but the field of AVS is trailing behind.
They are influenced by environmental exposure, life-style, and aging and have recently been shown to be altered in many complex diseases including inflammatory diseases.
Big Data, and in particular Electronic Health Records, provide the medical community with a great opportunity to analyze multiple pathological conditions at an unprecedented depth for many complex diseases, including diabetes.
Many complex diseases are likely due to a combination of rare and common variants.
In many complex diseases including cancer, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, and psychiatric disorders it is common to observe global DNA hypomethylation, as well as, gene specific hypermethylation [9], [10].
For many complex diseases, different ethnic groups have vastly different underlying genetics, and these differences may confound association results when they are pooled together as one in the analysis.
Genome wide association studies (GWAS) have recently identified genetic susceptibility for many complex diseases by genotyping hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the genome in very large sets of patients and controls [1].
