Epigenome-wide association studies: potential insights into human disease

The burden on human health due to common diseases, such as the metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular and inflammatory disorders is extreme. With increasingly longer lived populations, the morbidity of these chronic conditions leads to vast physical, psychological and economic cost. In order to further understand the pathogenicity of these complex diseases, the intertwined influence of environmental factors and polygenic susceptibility needs to be unravelled. This may at first seem an insurmountably difficult task but progress has been made in recent year