Genetics of Hip Dysplasia - A Systematic Literature Review
Our team just published a paper reviewing the genetics of hip dysplasia. Although several papers summarizing the field have previously been published, this paper critically reviews the field with regards to statistical power and other factors highlighting the need for larger studies.
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This review looks at genetic association studies on SNPs, single nucleotide polymorphisms. This is the most commonly studied type of genetic variant, especially in large scale studies. We find that many of the published studies are small and underpowered, as well as not correcting for sex bias between groups. As hip dysplasia is much more common among females, it is important that either the control groups are matched in terms of proportions of females or that the bias is corrected for in the statistical analyses.
The main candidate gene for hip dysplasia is GDF5, which was associated with hip dysplasia across several studies, most notably the large GWAS study by Hatzikotoulas et al. Our previous GWAS in the HUNT study supports these findings. You can read more about this study here and find the review paper here.