Medical Genetics
razib | January 17, 2010New genetic loci implicated in fasting glucose homeostasis and their impact on type 2 diabetes risk:
Levels of circulating glucose are tightly regulated. To identify new loci influencing glycemic traits, we performed meta-analyses of 21 genome-wide association studies informative for fasting glucose, fasting insulin and indices of beta-cell function (HOMA-B) and insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) in up to 46,186 nondiabetic participants. Follow-up of 25 loci in up to 76,558 additional subjects identified 16 loci associated with fasting glucose and HOMA-B and two loci associated with fasting insulin…
razib | May 11, 2009That seems the finding of this paper, Familial Aggregation of Survival and Late Female Reproduction:
Women giving birth at advanced reproductive ages in natural fertility conditions have been shown to have superior postmenopausal longevity. It is unknown whether improved survival is more likely among relatives of late-fertile women. This study compares survival past age 50 of men with and without a late-fertile sister in two populations: Utahns born in 1800-1869 identified from the Utah Population Database and Québec residents born in 1670-1750 identified from the Programme de recherche en…
razib | April 20, 2009In response to the NEJM issue on personal genomics and the CDCV hypothesis, p-ter offers a proposal:
Let's follow Goldstein's back-of-the-envelope calculations: assume there are ~100K polymorphisms (assuming Goldstein isn't making the mistake I attribute to him, this includes polymorphisms both common and rare) that contribute to human height, that we've found the ones that account for the largest fractions of the variance, and that these fractions of variance follow an exponential distribution.
Now, assume you have assembled a cohort of 5000 individuals and done a genome-wide association…
razib | March 21, 2009A few years ago a brown friend of mine complained that there were all these diseases which non-white people were susceptible to at a higher rate (e.g., Type II Diabetes, hypertension, ateriosclerosis, etc.), perhaps the white race was really superior (or medical geneticists were entering into a conspiracy to prove that this was so). So with that, I point to a new PLoS Genetics paper, An African Ancestry-Specific Allele of CTLA4 Confers Protection against Rheumatoid Arthritis in African Americans:
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic autoimmune condition affecting the synovial membranes of…