The Health of Presidents.
Today’s NEJM contains a must read editorial discussing the health of presidents and candidates. The issue is whether the media should have access to genetic scans of candidates. The media is incapable of understanding scientific analysis and reporting research correctly. One of the final paragraphs of the editorial states “For the foreseeable future, the examination of thousands of genes in any genome is likely to result in large numbers of false positive findings, along with “incidental” findings of dubious clinical value. Thus, when sequence information about individual genomes becomes available, we will have to contend not only with the statistical issues of replication, effect size, and attributable risk but also with the specter of genetic information that is wrong or misleading.”
These comments apply to most of the genetic scans being foisted on the public at present. At best they mislead while at worst they are downright dangerous. An association is not causation.
