DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[sam1933]

Race and ancestry in biomedical research: exploring the challenges
http://www.genomemedicine.com/content/pdf/gm8.pdf

...As a consequence, scientists with an interest in identifying genetic-association studies with disease are turning to DNA-based estimates of ‘ancestry’ as a basis for stratifying study samples and controlling for background genetic differences unrelated to disease risk [35-37]. Geneticists have also begun to use ancestry informative markers (AIMs) to identify groups and individuals subject to recent genetic admixture and use this information in methods such as admixture mapping [38-40]. In both gene-association and admixture studies, assessing ancestry is seen as preferable because it circumvents the problems of self-reporting, although major axes of differentiation continue to be drawn along conti- nental lines, recapitulating previously used racial distinc- tions: African, European, Native American, and so on.
Although ancestry estimation has the potential to control biases due to genetic confounding, in isolation its use defers, rather than addresses, the important problem of how social and biological risk factors interact in the context of health - including the production of racial health disparities. Research that simultaneously assesses both genetic and environmental contributions to disease risk, drug response and other health- related variation, and that deliberately puts such findings in the context of self-identified race, is urgently needed ....

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be
found online at http://genomemedicine.com/content/1/1/8