IJE Advance Access originally published online on October 5, 2007
International Journal of Epidemiology 2008 37(1):133-135; doi:10.1093/ije/dym205
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2007; all rights reserved.
Commentary: Genetic association studies see light at the end of the tunnel
Genetics of Complex Traits, Peninsula Medical School, University of Exeter, EX1 2LU, UK.
E-mail: Tim.frayling@pms.ac.uk
Accepted 6 September 2007
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
In this month's issue Ioannidis et al.1 provides a welcome guide to interpreting data from genetic association studies.
The authors’ efforts are important for two main reasons. First, genetic associations have been fraught with difficulty over the past 10 years in their attempts to uncover DNA polymorphisms that alter disease risk. The vast majority of reported associations, typically between a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and a disease, were not replicated. The reasons for this are now well understood and have been discussed before. The main problem is that geneticists have several 100 000 risk factors to study in the form of common polymorphisms but only a few are likely to be involved in any one disease. This makes the prior odds that any
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Why bother—are not most genetic effects very small? |
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Assessing the evidence |
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