Invisible Woman
Senior Member
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In other words, it could possibly work in our favour.
...but given the previous dubious behaviour of those driving MEGA and their pals.... it probably won't.
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In other words, it could possibly work in our favour.
So would be something the Big Data approach could work for, to cut through the noise?There might be a certain gene that you really have to have to develop ME. There are some genes like that for MS and AS. You still need huge cohorts to pick them out if you are trawling blind because of the statistical problems of false positives.
I'm probably only half getting what you're saying here, @user9876. Are you talking about isolating the gene in the first place? Or the process of inferring whether its predictive of some other health outcome, different from the one originally studied?I wasn't thinking of the stats directly rather if you build an abstract of the genes and the way they interact with environmental stimuli then I assume this would include a lot of non-linearity which makes predictions hard and unreliable. The test of the stats then comes in terms of whether you can find correlations that you have build into the model given the complexities of other interactions. (I am a believer in testing properties of stats models via simulation under different known stochastic conditions)
Yea, great explanation, @Jonathan Edwards.The danger that I see is that you may find a gene and if you have a woolly (with two l's and a y) hypothesis about how a disease may be caused you may well come to think the gene is doing one thing when it is doing another. That was precisely the problem for RA and T cells. So if your thinking is vague enough you can use genetics to support almost any idea. The fact that the gene has to be causally first remains a great strength, but it may still lead you up the garden path.
The only real potential weakness of picking out one gene as far as I know is that you may have linkage disequilibrium. That means that people with HLA-B27 might turn out almost always to have a gene for poor posture by some quirk of DNA structure or evolutionary pressures. We worried a lot about that in the 1990s but it looks as if it hardly ever causes a problem. Modern techniques can home in on a DNA sequence and define precisely where the causal factor is likely to be. That can usually be traced to one gene through one trick or another.