Viking disease is also a Neanderthal legacy
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After the color of the skin and hair, the tendency to accumulate the belly and the predisposition to diseases such as schizophrenia and Covid-19, the so-called Viking disease also enters the group of legacies left us by the Neanderthals: three of the major risk factors for this pathology, which leads the fingers of the hand to get stuck in a folded position, are in fact due to Neanderthal genes.
This was discovered by a study led by the Swedish Karolinska Institute and the German Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which analyzed the DNA of over 7,000 affected individuals and more than 645,000 healthy people. The research, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, is further evidence that the admixture between Neanderthals and our ancestors had important consequences.
Dupuytren’s disease
Dupuytren’s disease, known as Viking disease, is a disorder that affects a fibrous layer under the skin of the palm of the hand. Up to 30% of men over 60 living in Northern Europe suffer from it, hence its nickname.
“Because Dupuytren’s disease is rarely seen in individuals of African descent, we wondered whether genetic variants in Neanderthals could explain some of this pathology,” he comments. Hugo Zeberg of Karolinska, who led the study together with Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2022.
The researchers analyzed the DNA of more than 7,000 affected and more than 645,000 healthy individuals from the United States, the United Kingdom and Finland. They thus identified 61 genetic risk factors for this disorder: three of these, among the most important, were inherited from Neanderthals.
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