TY  - JOUR
A1  - Dörhöfer, Lena
A1  - Lammert, Alexander
A1  - Krane, Vera
A1  - Gorski, Mathias
A1  - Banas, Bernhard
A1  - Wanner, Christoph
A1  - Krämer, Bernhard K.
A1  - Heid, Iris M.
A1  - Böger, Carsten A.
T1  - Study design of DIACORE (DIAbetes COhoRtE) - a cohort study of patients with diabetes mellitus type 2
JF  - BMC Medical Genetics
N2  - Background: Diabetes mellitus type 2 (DM2) is highly associated with increased risk for chronic kidney disease (CKD), end stage renal disease (ESRD) and cardiovascular morbidity. Epidemiological and genetic studies generate hypotheses for innovative strategies in DM2 management by unravelling novel mechanisms of diabetes complications, which is essential for future intervention trials. We have thus initiated the DIAbetes COhoRtE study (DIACORE). 
Methods: DIACORE is a prospective cohort study aiming to recruit 6000 patients of self-reported Caucasian ethnicity with prevalent DM2 for at least 10 years of follow-up. Study visits are performed in University-based recruiting clinics in Germany using standard operating procedures. All prevalent DM2 patients in outpatient clinics surrounding the recruiting centers are invited to participate. At baseline and at each 2-year follow-up examination, patients are subjected to a core phenotyping protocol. This includes a standardized online questionnaire and physical examination to determine incident micro-and macrovascular DM2 complications, malignancy and hospitalization, with a primary focus on renal events. Confirmatory outcome information is requested from patient records. Blood samples are obtained for a centrally analyzed standard laboratory panel and for biobanking of aliquots of serum, plasma, urine, mRNA and DNA for future scientific use. A subset of the cohort is subjected to extended phenotyping, e. g. sleep apnea screening, skin autofluorescence measurement, non-mydriatic retinal photography and non-invasive determination of arterial stiffness. 
Discussion: DIACORE will enable the prospective evaluation of factors involved in DM2 complication pathogenesis using high-throughput technologies in biosamples and genetic epidemiological studies.
KW  - chronic kidney-disease
KW  - stage renal-disease
KW  - glomerular-filtration-rate
KW  - genome-wide association
KW  - blood-glucose control
KW  - genetics
KW  - serum creatinine
KW  - cardiovascular disease
KW  - replacement therapy
KW  - United States
KW  - risk factors
KW  - diabetes mellitus type 2
KW  - diabetic nephropathy
KW  - end stage renal disease
KW  - cardiovascular morbidity
KW  - diabetes complications
KW  - epidemiology
Y1  - 2013
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-122040
SN  - 1471-2350
VL  - 14
IS  - 25
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Grassmann, Felix
A1  - Fritsche, Lars G.
A1  - Keilhauer, Claudia N.
A1  - Heid, Iris M.
A1  - Weber, Bernhard H. F.
T1  - Modelling the Genetic Risk in Age-Related Macular Degeneration
JF  - PLoS One
N2  - Late-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a common sight-threatening disease of the central retina affecting approximately 1 in 30 Caucasians. Besides age and smoking, genetic variants from several gene loci have reproducibly been associated with this condition and likely explain a large proportion of disease. Here, we developed a genetic risk score (GRS) for AMD based on 13 risk variants from eight gene loci. The model exhibited good discriminative accuracy, area-under-curve (AUC) of the receiver-operating characteristic of 0.820, which was confirmed in a cross-validation approach. Noteworthy, younger AMD patients aged below 75 had a significantly higher mean GRS (1.87, 95% CI: 1.69-2.05) than patients aged 75 and above (1.45, 95% CI: 1.36-1.54). Based on five equally sized GRS intervals, we present a risk classification with a relative AMD risk of 64.0 (95% CI: 14.11-1131.96) for individuals in the highest category (GRS 3.44-5.18, 0.5% of the general population) compared to subjects with the most common genetic background (GRS -0.05-1.70, 40.2% of general population). The highest GRS category identifies AMD patients with a sensitivity of 7.9% and a specificity of 99.9% when compared to the four lower categories. Modeling a general population around 85 years of age, 87.4% of individuals in the highest GRS category would be expected to develop AMD by that age. In contrast, only 2.2% of individuals in the two lowest GRS categories which represent almost 50% of the general population are expected to manifest AMD. Our findings underscore the large proportion of AMD cases explained by genetics particularly for younger AMD patients. The five-category risk classification could be useful for therapeutic stratification or for diagnostic testing purposes once preventive treatment is available.
KW  - AMD
KW  - complement factor-H
KW  - grading system
KW  - United States
KW  - vitamin C
KW  - prevalence
KW  - variants
KW  - susceptibility
KW  - association
KW  - maculopathy
KW  - variant genotypes
KW  - genetic loci
KW  - macular degeneration
KW  - genetics of disease
KW  - eyes
KW  - cased-control studies
KW  - genotyping
KW  - human genetics
Y1  - 2012
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-131315
VL  - 7
IS  - 5
ER  -