April 5, 2010
The tenth anniversary of the completion of the first draft of the human genome is approaching, apparently putting a lot of scientists in the mood for reflection on the past and speculation about the future of genetics. The journal Nature has a series of opinion articles and two news articles on the [...]
March 31, 2010
Each year at least 350 million people around the world are infected by malaria parasites. More than one million people, mainly young children, succumb to the disease. But these numbers would be even higher if it weren’t for genetic adaptations that have evolved in populations living in areas where [...]
March 24, 2010
Denisova cave from the outside. / Bence Viola. DNA isolated from a tiny bone fragment from the finger of a being that walked the earth between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago has possibly added a new branch to the human family tree. The piece of bone was found in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains, [...]
March 23, 2010
From rich brown to almost translucent white, human skin colors span a remarkable spectrum. The evolutionary story of how we came to be such a varied species skin color-wise began around 40,000 years ago when the human groups that had left Africa and spread out along the southern coast of Asia began to [...]
March 19, 2010
A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) this week, entitled "Performance of Common Genetic Variants in Breast-Cancer Risk Models," has led several media outlets to declare that common genetic variants have nothing to add when it comes to predicting breast cancer risk. Here we'll [...]
March 18, 2010
Today the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced its plans to create a public database in which genetic test providers will voluntarily deposit information about their services that can then be searched by researchers, consumers, health care providers, and others. The aim of this Genetic Testing [...]
March 16, 2010
Today at the American College of Cardiology conference in Atlanta, researchers from the Mayo Clinic and Medco Health Solutions, Inc., presented results showing that using genetic testing to guide dosing of the commonly used blood thinner warfarin reduces hospitalizations. Overall there were 31% fewer [...]
March 15, 2010
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has updated the label information for the commonly used anti-clotting medication Plavix® (clopidogrel) to stress to physicians that patients carrying certain genetic variations may not receive the full benefit from the drug. Plavix reduces the chance a harmful [...]
March 10, 2010
Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer (excluding skin cancers) and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. Each year about 150,000 people are diagnosed with the disease. Risk factors for colorectal cancer include age (most cases occur in people over 50), [...]
March 4, 2010
Researchers have identified several genetic variations associated with the timing of a baby's first tooth and the number of teeth at age one. The results, published recently in the journal PLoS Genetics, could be important for understanding more about human health than just this rite of passage all babies [...]
