Genetic Disorders in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Oman: Lessons Learned

Ever since its initiation, the Catalogue for Transmission Genetics in Arabs (CTGA) database has endeavored to index reports of genetic disorders among Arab patients. This is a daunting task, compounded by the fact that the Arabs not only constitute a huge population of close to 340 million people, but are also spread over 23 countries covering 14 million square km in two continents within their homeland itself. Add to this the Arab diaspora spread around the world, and a picture of truly massive proportions emerges. The CTGA Database Development Team realized earlier on that this enormous undertaking would need to be managed in a systematic manner. To this end, the Team works on the database in a targeted fashion, focusing on a single Arab country at a time. This strategy, initiated with the United Arab Emirates, has enabled the complete coverage of genetic disorders in two more countries (Kingdom of Bahrain and Sultanate of Oman), while maintaining a basal amount of information in the remaining Arab countries.