A genome-wide association study implicates the pleiotropic effect of NMUR2 on asthma and COPD

Abstract

Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are two distinct diseases that are associated with chronic infammation. They share common features in terms of their advanced stages and genetic factors. This study aimed to identify novel genes underlying both asthma and COPD using genome-wide association study (GWAS) to diferentiate between the two diseases. We performed a GWAS of asthma and COPD in 7828 Koreans from three hospitals. In addition, we investigated genetic correlations. The UK Biobank dataset was used for the replication studies. We found that rs2961757, located near neuromedin U receptor 2 (NMUR2) on chromosome 5, was genome-wide signifcant (βAsthma−COPD = 0.44, P-valueAsthma-COPD = 3.41 × ­10−8), and signifcant results were replicated with the UK Biobank data (βAsthma−COPD = 0.04, P-valueAsthma-COPD = 0.0431). A positive genetic correlation was observed between asthma and COPD (39.8% in the Korean dataset and 49.8% in the UK Biobank dataset). In this study, 40–45% of the genetic efects were common to asthma and COPD. Moreover, NMUR2 increases the risk of asthma development and suppresses COPD development. This indicates that NMUR2 allows for better diferentiation of both diseases, which can facilitate tailored medical therapy