Risk of diabetes, depression and cancer may be related to socioeconomic status, study finds.
People with low socioeconomic status, defined by educational and occupational achievements, are more likely to develop complex diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
They also have a greater genetic susceptibility to developing other complex diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, lung cancer, depression and alcohol use disorders.
In contrast, a study by a team from the University of Helsinki in Finland found that people with high birth weight have a high risk of developing some types of breast and prostate cancer.
The findings, based on genomics, socioeconomic status and health data from approximately 2,80,000 Finnish individuals, were presented at the ongoing annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Germany.
Researchers suggest that adding a polygenic risk score, which measures an individual’s risk of a particular disease based on genetic information, to screening protocols could help diagnose many diseases.
“Understanding that the influence of the polygenic score on disease risk depends on the context can lead to indirect screening protocols,” says Fiona Hagenbeek, a postdoctoral researcher at the Finnish Institute of Molecular Medicine (FIMM).
