Genetic tests for potentially fatal heart anomaly can misdiagnose condition in black Americans
Thursday, August 18, 2016 - 05:01
in Biology & Nature
Researchers trace the roots of this diagnostic disparity to the lack of racial diversity in decades-old studies that misidentified benign genetic variants as disease causing. Benign variants on genes implicated in the disease are far more common in black Americans than in white Americans. The findings underscore a pressing need to reevaluate decades-old genetic studies by using new racially diverse sequencing data.