There’s a high likelihood that a disease of some sort affects you or one of your relatives — every family seems to have ripples in its gene pool that define and shape its health dynamics.

Your family might have a propensity for rheumatoid arthritis or a particular type of cancer. Whatever it is, there can be an instant family bond created by that disease — along with a sense of fate.

That feeling moves some families to action. The Heywood brothers started PatientsLikeMe when one of them, Stephen, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1998. Nancy Brinker created a huge force in breast cancer research through the Susan G. Komen Foundation, named for her sister who died of that disease. Michael J. Fox, a father of four, started his remarkable foundation after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 30.

But not everyone can garner the resources to create their own company or foundation; it’s hard to know where to turn in trying to make a difference. This summer, 23andMe is launching the Research Revolution to empower more people to jumpstart genetic research into the diseases that affect them and the people they love.

This new research model makes it possible for large groups of people to assemble themselves into large-scale genetic studies without having to raise millions of dollars in funding, and then wait years for things to get rolling. Participants also get access to their own genetic information through the 23andMe Personal Genome Service Research Edition, which offers a snapshot of what their data says about more than 100 diseases and traits. We believe that if you volunteer for research, you should be able to see what you’ve contributed to the effort.

The Research Revolution is going to start with the 10 diseases listed at the bottom of this post. There are several ways you can participate:

* Visit the Research Revolution page and vote for the disease you would most like 23andMe to study.
* If you’re already a 23andMe customer, log into your account and complete any of the 23andWe surveys you haven’t taken yet.
* Spread the word — especially to people who are patients or survivors of the 10 diseases we’re featuring.

There’s strength in numbers. The more people who enroll in the Research Revolution, the more likely it is to make new discoveries about the causes and about the treatments of disease.

Long live the revolution!

The 10 Research Revolution diseases are:

ALS
Celiac Disease
Epilepsy
Lymphoma and Leukemia
Migraines
Multiple Sclerosis
Psoriasis
Rheumatoid Arthritis
Severe Food Allergies
Testicular Cancer

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Variations in several genes may affect a young man’s risk of developing testicular cancer, new research says. One of these variations may also explain why the disease is more common in whites than blacks.

Testicular cancer is the most common type of cancer in men age 15 to 35, and it is on the rise.  The incidence of the disease in the United States has doubled since 1975.  The speed of this increase suggests that environmental factors are at work, but researchers know that genes have a substantial influence on the disease too – testicular cancer is one of the most heritable types of cancer.

Clear genetic risk factors for most cases of testicular cancer, however, have so far not been identified. But now two groups, publishing online this week in the journal Nature Genetics, report finding several common genetic variations that are associated with increased risk for the disease.

In a study of 730 men with testicular cancer and 1,435 controls, Rapley et al. found that each copy of the more common G version of rs995030 in the KITLG gene increased the odds of testicular cancer by 2.55 times compared to two copies of the A version of this SNP. (The second study by Kanetsky et al. found a similar association with nearby SNPs in a similarly sized study).

Dr. Katherine Nathanson, an author of the Kanetsky et al. study, pointed out in a statement that the G version of rs995030 is very common in Caucasians.  This is noteworthy because it is usually the less common version of a SNP that is associated with increased disease risk.  In Nathanson’s opinion, men who carry two copies of the less common A version of the SNP are probably at “incredibly low risk” for testicular cancer.

In the same statement, lead author Peter Kanetsky suggested that the high prevalence of the riskier version of this SNPs might mean that it makes some men more susceptible to testicular cancer, but that some environmental factor may also be needed to actually cause disease.  He said that knowing which gene to look more closely at will help guide researchers’ efforts at identifying the other factors that are involved.

(23andMe customers can check their data for rs995030, as well as other SNPs mentioned in this post, using the Browse Raw Data feature.)

The KITLG gene has previously been associated with germ cell development and testicular cancer, but it is also involved in pigmentation.  Changes in this gene that are associated with lighter coloring have been strongly selected for in Europeans, and having a G at rs995030 is one of the variations that is more common in whites than African Americans. The researchers suggest that this may be part of the reason the disease is almost five times more common in whites.

Rapley et al. also found that each copy of the A version of rs4624820 increased the odds of testicular cancer by 1.37 times compared to having two Gs (Kanetsky et al. also identified a similar association with a nearby SNP.) Each copy of a G at rs210138 was found to increase the odds of testicular cancer by 1.50 times compared to having two As.

“These results raise the possibility that, in conjunction with other know risk factors, these variants may be used in the future for risk prediction, particularly given the availability of relatively simple screening approaches such as testicular ultrasound.  Further studies will be required, however, to refine the risk estimates and their interactions before this can be considered in clinical practice,” the authors of the Rapley et al. study conclude.

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