A genome-wide association study implicates the pleiotropic effect of NMUR2 on asthma and COPD

hma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are two distinct diseases that are associated with chronic inflammation. They share common features in terms of their advanced stages and genetic factors. This study aimed to identify novel genes underlying both asthma and COPD using genome-wide association study (GWAS) to differentiate between the two diseases. We performed a GWAS of asthma and COPD in 7828 Koreans from three hospitals. In addition, we investigated genetic correlations. The UK Biobank dataset was used for the replication studies. We found that rs2961757, located near neuromedin U receptor 2 ( NMUR2 ) on chromosome 5, was genome-wide significant ( _Asthma-COPD = 0.44, P -value Asthma-COPD = 3.41 × 10 −8 ), and significant results were replicated with the UK Biobank data ( _Asthma-COPD = 0.04, P -value Asthma-COPD = 0.0431). A positive genetic correlation was observed between asthma and COPD (39.8