Future of Disease Gene-Hunting Studies Questioned

A moment of astonishing lucidity from the sick care community.

"Disagreements within the medical community on the utility -- or futility, as some see it -- of genome-wide association studies reached a new prominence this week.

Four 'Perspective' articles in the April 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine hashed out the pros and cons of whether these expensive genomic studies continue to be worth pursuing.

Even the defenders of such studies do not dispute that, thus far, they have failed to realize early promises that genomics would revolutionize clinical medicine."

So much for a genetic "cure" to fatsoness in the near future - though fatsoness is not a condition for "clinical medicine."

"When focused on common chronic disorders such as type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease, these studies have uncovered a vast array of genomic variations associated with disease.

But these variants confer relatively modest increases in risk and are found in only small portions of the population. Most of the incidence of chronic diseases still cannot be attributed to genetics.

'The great majority of the newly identified risk-marker alleles confer very small relative risks, ranging from 1.1 to 1.5,' wrote two Harvard School of Public Health researchers, Peter Kraft, Ph.D., and David J. Hunter, M.B., Sc.D, M.P.H., in one of the NEJM articles.

Although Drs. Kraft and Hunter argued that genome-wide association studies remain valuable, they acknowledged that those discovered to date do not have much diagnostic utility, even when combined."

And who saw this coming? Fitness Watch readers, of course.

"David B. Goldstein, Ph.D., of Duke University, argued forcefully that the research community would do better to focus its efforts elsewhere.

He suggested that if there were any common gene variants responsible in a major way for chronic diseases, they would have been found already."

You can expect this clarity to soon cloud over and that the idiocrats in DC will continue to fund this crap research.