This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Genetic Disorders  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: In his Special Communication on genetic influences on health, Dr Bamshad¹ attempts to offer practical advice for an increasingly contentious issue with his recommendation that clinicians use ancestry instead of race to identify risk factors for disease and predictors of treatment response. His argument that race is a weak proxy for genetic risk is an important one that raises timely questions in light of recent race-based developments in the pharmaceutical industry, such as the recent approval of BiDil as a therapy for African Americans with heart failure.² Yet Bamshad's recommendation that a way around racialized medicine is through ancestry-based medicine offers too little in response to such a significant issue.

Individuals do not cluster discretely by continent of origin. Instead, the bulk of human genetic variation is continuously distributed and, as a result, any categorization schema attempting to meaningfully partition that variation will necessarily create artificial truncations. . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Reanne Frank, PhD
rfrank@hsph.harvard.edu
School of Public Health
Harvard University
Boston, Mass

Danielle Frank, MD
Department of Medicine
University of Washington
Seattle

RELATED ARTICLES

Genetic Influences on Health: Does Race Matter?

JAMA. ;294():937-946.
FULL TEXT  

Race and Genetic Influences on Health--Reply

JAMA. ;295():385-386.
FULL TEXT