Genomic Approach to Complex Diseases

Abstract

The complex or multifactorial diseases are those which develop through interactions of often hundreds of genes and environmental factors. The complex diseases like cancer, asthma, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular diseases or Alzheimer disease are often very frequent, it can even be said that more or less everybody is affected by some of them. In this review it is discussed why it is important to study the genomic background of the complex diseases and the main genomic methods are summarized. Next, the difficulties of these studies are shown and discussed what the reason of the missing heritability of the complex diseases can be. In the end some developments are shown which try to cope with these problems.