An Appeal to Minority Vitiligo Patients
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As many of you know, we are working to discover the genes that cause vitiligo. Understanding these genes will help us understand the basic biology, a key first step towards better treatments or cure. We have now completed the first large genetic studies in Caucasians, and a parallel study has been done in Chinese. The results have given us extraordinary understanding of vitiligo, far better than we have ever had before. The results are also clear that between Caucasians and Chinese Asians, while there are some similarities, there are also very major differences in the causes of vitiligo. Therefore, each ethnic group must be studied individually.
This means that future treatments and even cures may not benefit all patients equally, based on underlying personal and ethnic genetic differences. Thus, certain drugs may work best for certain individuals or for patients from certain ethnic groups. This is already true for some drugs that turn out to only work well in African-Americans, and so are only FDA-approved for use in those patients.
We are in urgent need of patients from the major USA minority groups-African-American and Hispanic-Latino, as well as Indian-Pakistani. To date we have had to rely on Caucasians for our studies as they are the only group that have volunteered to participate in numbers great enough to study.
We need your participation - both minority patients and minority "controls" (non-blood relatives without vitiligo). Your personal information, by law, will be kept private and will not be sold or disclosed. Through your participation, you will help to ensure that future discoveries and treatments will apply to minority groups as well.
Join with us to work for a vitiligo-free future! Click here to participate now.
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