Common Diseases Are Found to Vary by Continent - NYTimes.com: A new survey of the human genome shows that common diseases are likely to have a different set of genetic roots in Africans, East Asians and Europeans.
The finding may represent yet another serious complication in the post-genome quest for the roots of common disease, since it implies that each disease may need to be investigated separately in different populations.
After the human genome was decoded in 2003, biologists completed a follow-up project called the HapMap that cataloged the genome’s common variations, meaning the sites on the DNA where one unit often differs from the standard sequence. They then scanned the genomes of patients with common diseases to look for statistical links between having a disease and having a particular variation.
