Monday, July 29, 2019

PTSD GWAS: Another fast and loose with the term "Replication"

This study, a GWAS for PTSD (or symptoms related to PTSD, might be more accurate), like most found a few loci with significant p values. They found 8 in a sample of 120,000 "European Americans" and zero in a sample of 20,000 African Americans. I'd say this is what you might expect for the false positive rates of such studies. They go on to claim that it was "replicated in the UK Biobank." I'll make a quick point after the fold:

Monday, July 15, 2019

Another Unreplicated, hyped study of Anorexia Nervosa

This post takes a quick look at this GWAS study for Anorexia Nervosa. Let me start this off by saying that Anorexia Nervosa is quite clearly a disorder created by our society and compounded by particular childhood trauma issues that I won't get into here. Moreover, looking at this disorder as some kind of metabolic disease and trying to pass it off as a genetically based disorder is very unfortunate and I think shows some real lack of understanding of clinical disorders, and bizarrely reduces it to chemical mechanisms.  In the long list of authors for this paper, I would hope at least a few have some actual clinical experience with this disorder, but you wouldn't get a sense of it from the paper.
Now that I got that out of the way, let me briefly discuss the paper itself, which follows the usual formula for GWAS these days: