By Luke Jostins, a postgraduate student working on the genetic basis of complex autoimmune diseases. Jostins has a strong background in informatics and statistical genetics, and writes about genetic epidemiology and sequencing technology on the his blog Genetic Inference. A different version of this post appeared on the group blog Genomes Unzipped.
One of the great hopes for genetic medicine is that we will be able to predict which people will develop certain diseases, and then focus preventative measures to those at risk. Scientists have long known that one of the wrinkles in this plan is that we will only rarely be able to say with certainty whether someone develop a given disease based on their genetics—more often, we can only give an estimate of their disease risk.
This realization came mostly from twin studies, which look at the disease histories of identical and non-identical twins. Twin studies use established models of genetic risk among families and populations, along with the different levels of similarity of identical and non-identical twins, to estimate how much of disease risk comes from genetic factors and how much comes from environmental risk factors. (See this post for more details.) There are some complexities here, and ...
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