International Journal of Epidemiology 2003;32:26-28
© International Epidemiological Association 2003
Review |
Commentary: Race, genetics, and disease in search of a middle ground
Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente, 2000 Broadway, Oatland, CA 94612, USA. E-mail: andy.j.karter@kp.org
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In the article, Race, genes, and healthnew wine in old bottles? in this issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology, Dr Cooper1 presents an interesting perspective about the role of race in the study of genetics and disease. That paper is largely a critique of a recent paper in Genome Biology in which Risch et al.2 reported evidence supporting categorization based on five major categories of self-identified race (Africans, Caucasians, Pacific Islanders, Asians, and Native Americans) and suggested that identifying genetic differences between these groups was scientifically appropriate. Cooper counters that there is insufficient evidence that race or continental ancestry has a biological (genetic) significance. He suggests that race is too crude a measure to have value in public health, and that finer-grained (sub-) categorizations (e.g. Scandinavians or Bantus) would be more informative than continental ancestry. He predicts that although populations show racial variation in genetic risk of rare,
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