Nice critique by Peter Simons of a genetic study for bipolar disorder among Han Chinese with the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder (original study here). A couple of excerpts:
The researchers analyzed thousands of Han Chinese people and found that genetics explained just 2.3% of whether they received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (BD) or not...
However, it is unclear how tiny correlations like this—which affect but a tiny sample of the population studied and explain less than 3% of the risk for a diagnosis—could help researchers understand the supposed “biological etiology” of bipolar disorder. In fact, they rather show that more than 97% of the reason that someone gets a diagnosis is explained by factors other than biology.
As I like to point out, even the 3% is quite suspect and is arguably noise and should be tested against a null trait to establish that the 3% is not the null.
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