Genetics of Common Musculoskeletal Disordersin Adults

Je-Hyun Yoo, Hind Sawan and Ja

Abstract

Common musculoskeletal disorders in adults are mostly degenerative and polygenic diseases influenced by both genetic and environmental factors.Hence, the identification of susceptibility genes may provide clues to their etiology and pathogenesis and this genetic study is demanded to gain better insight into advanced diagnosis and treatment for these disorders. Osteoarthritis (OA) of hip and knee joints, degenerative disc disease (DDD), and developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) are common musculoskeletal disorders in adults, and numerous genetic studies including genome-wide association studies have revealed several interesting predisposing candidate genes for these disorders along witha genetic overlap amongthose to date. However, only a few genes have far been associated with the above disorders at genome-wide significance levels. Accordingly, we have to discover additional susceptibility alleles for these disorders. This brief report describes the presence and future for geneticstudies of common musculoskeletal disorders in adults, especially focused on OA, DDH, and DDD, of which the genetics have been actively studied through advanced technique such as whole-genome sequencing recently.