
Lack of Diversity in Pulmonary Fibrosis Genetic Studies Limits Clinical Applicability: Ayodeji Adegunsoye, MD, PhD, MSc
Ayodeji Adegunsoye, MD, PhD, MSc, highlights how the underrepresentation of minority populations in pulmonary fibrosis genetic studies hinders accurate disease risk prediction and broader clinical translation.
In an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care® (AJMC®), Ayodeji Adegunsoye, MD, PhD, MSc, FACP, FCCP, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, explains that many genetic studies of
In the
This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.
Transcript
Your research focuses on identifying and optimizing treatment for patients with pulmonary fibrosis across racial groups. How has the exclusion of certain populations from genetic studies seemed to impact outcomes thus far?
I think it's a big factor in how we think about the disease itself. So far to date, there have been large exclusions of certain racial populations [and] certain cultural or ethnic populations in many of the genetic studies to date. And that really limits our understanding of what genetics contributes to the disease pathophysiology itself.
These large exclusions of minority populations limit our ability to translate what we find from 1 population to the entire population, so the generalizability becomes incredibly limited. It also impairs our ability to think about polygenic risk scores. Certain pooled genetic risk factors, which we call risk scores, cannot be applied to other populations because they were not derived in them, and so they wouldn't have external values in them.
I think we need to think about making this test more widescale, more broadly implemented, so that the value we get from them are broadly applicable as well.
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