The next big thing in medicine is supposed to be precision medicine …[But we] have a big problem: Our genetic studies are leaving out ethnic and racial minorities. Those minorities, whose medical care has long lagged behind that of white Americans, are at risk of being left out of what is supposed to be a major new development in medicine.
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Whites of European ancestry still make up the vast majority of subjects in large genetic studies — over 80 percent. There has been an increase in genetic studies of Asians,…[but] Africans, African Americans, and Hispanics still make up less than 4 percent of the subjects of these studies.
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A mutation that increases the risk for breast cancer, for example, might be much more frequent among African Americans than among whites of European descent. Such mutations might not be detected at all in studies that include mainly whites, with the result that researchers miss an important genetic cause of breast cancer. The problem runs the other way as well….
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: The Inexcusable Lack of Diversity in Genetic Studies
