2023-11-25 08:13:00
Men over 50 in particular suffer from the Viking disease Dupuytren’s disease. Now researchers have identified the main cause of the suffering.
It starts with sometimes painful nodules on the palms of the hands. Then one or more fingers can no longer be stretched. At some point the limbs remain stiff. Dupuytren’s disease primarily affects older men – up to 30 percent of those over 60 in Northern Europe.
That’s why the condition is also known as Viking disease. And as researchers have now discovered, Neanderthal genes significantly increase the risk of disease.
“Since Dupuytren’s contracture rarely occurs in people of African descent, we asked ourselves whether gene variants from Neanderthals can partially explain why people outside of Africa are predominantly affected,” says Hugo Zeberg from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, commenting on the study.
The most important risk factors come from Neanderthals
According to their study, the scientists compared the genomes of 7,871 people suffering from Dupuytren’s disease and compared them with those of 645,880 healthy controls. The researchers discovered 61 genetic risk factors for Viking disease.
As the scientists write, the sufferers inherited two of the three most important risk factors for Dupuytren’s disease from Neanderthals. This is further evidence that the interbreeding between Neanderthals and our ancestors can have enormous consequences for the development of diseases, they say.
At the end of 2020, researchers from the Max Planck Institute found that a DNA sequence from Neanderthals is associated with a higher risk of severe Covid-19 in northern Europeans.
It was said at the time that people suffering from Covid with this gene variant would need to be artificially ventilated was around three times more likely. In another study, researchers found that Neanderthal genes might have a positive influence on the course of corona disease.
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