Admixture mapping turns up 48 disease links that GWAS missed in biobank study
In the BioMe biobank, a technique called admixture mapping turned up 77 disease signals across more than 800 clinical phenotypes, including 48 that genome-wide association studies missed. The findings, published in Nature Communications, came from 14,876 Hispanic or Latino participants and 8,819 African American participants, using computing resources at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. GWAS still caught more signals overall, and those signals carried higher odds ratios. Admixture mapping picked up variants with higher population differentiation instead. The two methods complemented each other.
Clinicians weighing disease risk in Hispanic or African American patients have loci to check that standard genome scans overlook.
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