Genetic variants associated with Crohn’s disease are reported this week in Nature Genetics. Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory disease, which causes inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract.

Miles Parkes and colleagues report results of a meta-analysis of six genome-wide association studies for Crohn’s disease, with follow-up validation in a large independent sample collection. They identify 30 genomic regions newly associated with Crohn’s disease. Together with previous studies, this brings the total number of identified susceptibility loci for Crohn’s disease up to 71.