It is the norm today to discuss race as a social construct. Less fashionable is it to explore race as a biological concept. When there's no up or downside and the discussion is abstract I think most people can get away with benign neglect in regards to the second; but when your health is at issue people's ears perk up. The HapMap. Here's the first paragraph in Wikipedia on the HapMap:
Photo credit: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY
The International HapMap Project is an organization whose goal is to develop a haplotype map of the human genome (the HapMap), which will
describe the common patterns of human genetic variation.
The HapMap is expected to be a key resource for researchers to find genetic variants affecting health, disease and responses to drugs and environmental factors....
The rationale behind the HapMap is practical, but its yield has a great deal of basic science relevance. Last year's story about human adaptive acceleration does have connections with disease, but fundamentally its goal was fixated on questions of evolutionary anthropology and demographics, not clinical health. Of course "human genetic variation" can mean many things. There are after all de novo mutations which arise across the generations so that each child differs from their parents in a subset of deleterious mutants. This isn't the focus of something like the HapMap (note the point about "common patterns"), but at some point I assume that full genomic sequencing will make these comparisons more concrete so as to help develop clinical regimes that are extremely individual tailored. But on to the main topic at hand, next month in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology there will be an article on prenatal risks to pregnancies of Asian-white couples. From EurekaAlert, Asian-white couples face distinct pregnancy risks...:
It's difficult to estimate the prevalence of Asian-white couples, but 14.3 percent of Americans reporting Asian race in the U.S. Census Bureau's 2000 survey also reported being of mixed Asian-white ancestry. Although past studies have looked at ethnic differences in perinatal outcomes, the majority of research has focused on white- African-American couples. Few studies have focused specifically on Asian-white couples, said El-Sayed, who is also associate chief of maternal-fetal medicine. ... More specifically, the researchers found that white mother/Asian father couples had the lowest rate (23 percent) of caesarean delivery, while Asian mother/white father couples had the highest rate (33.2 percent). Because birth weights between these two groups were similar, the researchers say the findings suggest that the average Asian woman's pelvis may be smaller than the average white woman's and less able to accommodate babies of a certain size. (Asian couples had babies with the lowest median birth weight, so caesarean delivery was less common among those women.) It's important for clinicians to know which women may have an increased risk of caesarean delivery, so they can conduct proper counseling prior to childbirth, El-Sayed said. El-Sayed and his colleagues also found that the incidence of gestational diabetes was lowest among white couples at 1.61 percent and highest among Asian couples at 5.73 percent - and just under 4 percent for Asian-white couples. These findings weren't altogether surprising: past studies have shown an increased risk of diabetes among Asian couples, which researchers attribute to an underlying genetic predisposition. But the interesting finding, El-Sayed said, was that the risk for interracial couples was about the same regardless of which parent was Asian.
