Xu et al. (1) argued that a west-east cline of Asian-Papuan genetic admixture across eastern Indonesia “is in excellent agreement with inferences” (ref. 1, p. 4574) regarding the expansion of Austronesian languages from Taiwan across Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) from circa 4,000 y ago. They identify two major genetic populations within ISEA, “Asian” and “Papuan,” which allegedly reflect Austron...

ONE EAST ASIAN country after another has taken off from a stagnant state to achieve an annual economic growth rate of 10 percent or more. The fact that such high economic growth rates are being sustained, along with observation based on growth convergence regressions that prior economic and social conditions do not seem to have warranted such rapid growth, has led many to call the East Asian gr...

Prostate cancer is the most prevalent cancer in males in Western countries. The reported incidence in Asia is much lower than that in African Americans and European Caucasians. Although the lack of systematic prostate cancer screening system in Asian countries explains part of the difference, this alone cannot fully explain the lower incidence in Asian immigrants in the United States and west-E...

Background: Gastritis results from multifactorial gastric mucosal injury. Helicobacter pylori (Hp) is the main cause, and associated diseases have typical underlying patterns of gastritis. Gastric ulcer and gastric cancer (GC) develop from chronic atrophic corpus gastritis (CAG) which therefore represents the most important pattern. GC incidences in East Asia are substantially higher than elsew...

BACKGROUND Von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) syndrome is a dominantly inherited multisystem cancer syndrome caused by a heterozygous mutation in the VHL tumor suppressor gene. Previous studies suggested that similar populations of Caucasian and Japanese patients have similar genotype or phenotype characteristics. In this comprehensive study of East Asian patients, we investigated the genetic and clinical...

PURPOSE Peripheral refraction is commonly used to infer retinal shape. Because of the different prevalence of myopia in the white compared with East Asian populations, peripheral refraction along the horizontal meridian was compared in white and East Asian young adults with emmetropic, low myopic, and moderately myopic refractive errors. METHODS Thirty-five white and 37 East Asian subjects we...

This article reports on the first genetic assessment of the contemporary Mauritian population. Small island nodes such as Mauritius played a critical role in historic globalization processes and revealing high-resolution details of labour sourcing is crucial in order to better understand early-modern diaspora events. Mauritius is a particularly interesting case given detailed historic accounts ...