Sunday, November 13, 2005

More than meets the Census worker's eye   posted by Razib @ 11/13/2005 11:19:00 PM
Share/Bookmark

Earlier this year in Genetic structure, self-identified race/ethnicity, and confounding in case-control association studies the authors found a very tight correlation between reported racial ancestry and separable genetic clusters derived from data drawn from many microstatellites. Importantly, though the Chinese and Japanese in the "Asian" cluster were separable, there was little evidence of further substructure within the other racial populations, but they offered caution in regards to the Hispanic group, which is clearly admixed. So, no surprise that Population stratification confounds genetic association studies among Latinos. They conclude, "Our findings suggest that empirical assessment of the effects of stratification is critical to appropriately interpret the results of case-control studies in admixed populations."