An international team of researchers has identified about 40 DNA regions that increase the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.
The research team – whose results were published in the scientific journal “Nature” – believes that drugs can be found that target these areas, which makes finding a cure for this disease possible one day.
The researchers compared DNA samples taken from people with arthritis with other samples from healthy people.
It was found that there are 42 “affected” areas related to the disease. Therefore, the researchers hope that the drug that will be developed will mitigate the effect in these areas.
Robert Bling, a professor at Harvard Medical School and head of the research team, says that the affected areas responded to a drug that was developed before, and was not specifically made to treat this genetic problem, and he believes that this result may help in the synthesis of new drugs.
He added, according to the BBC website: “This discovery provides an opportunity in the future to use genes in finding drugs for incurable diseases such as rheumatoid, so that this disease can be treated.”
This research is considered one of the largest genetic studies conducted to date, as it included nearly 30,000 patients.
