The American Eel (Anguilla rostrata) has an exceptional life cycle characterized by panmictic reproduction at the species scale, random dispersal, and selection in a highly heterogeneous habitat extending from subtropical to subarctic latitudes. The genetic consequences of spatially-varying selection in this species have been investigated for decades, revealing subtle clines in allele frequency...

The substantial heritability of most complex diseases suggests that genetic data could provide useful risk prediction. To date the performance of genetic risk scores has fallen short of the potential implied by heritability, but this can be explained by insufficient sample sizes for estimating highly polygenic models. When risk predictors already exist based on environment or lifestyle, two key...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Statistical analysis of age-at-onset involving family data is particularly complicated because there is a correlation pattern that needs to be modeled and also because there are measurements that are censored. In this paper, our main purpose was to evaluate the effect of genetic and shared family environmental factors on age-at-onset of three cardiovascular risk factors: hyperte...

Vol. 13, July-September, 2014 Annals of African Medicine Sir, The recent report on dyslipidemia among HIV‐infected patients is very interesting.[1] Muhammad et al., concluded that “HIV‐infected patients on HAART demonstrated higher prevalence of high TC while HAART naïve subject showed higher prevalence of low HDL.[1]” Indeed, the problem of dyslipidemia is well‐known among the HIV‐infected pat...

Emerging evidence suggests that dyslipidemia is an independent risk factor for diabetic neuropathy (DN) (reviewed by Vincent et al. 2009). To experimentally determine how dyslipidemia alters DN, we quantified neuropathic symptoms in diabetic mice fed a high-fat diet. Streptozotocin-induced diabetic C57BL/6 mice fed a high-fat diet developed dyslipidemia and a painful neuropathy (mechanical allo...

A new mixed-model method was developed for mapping quantitative trait loci (QTL) by incorporating multiple polygenic covariance structures. First, we used genome-wide markers to calculate six different kinship matrices. We then partitioned the total genetic variance into six variance components, one corresponding to each kinship matrix, including the additive, dominance, additive × additive, do...

Background The relationship between obesity and health expenditures is not well understood. We examined the relationship between genetic predisposition to obesity measured by a polygenic risk score for body mass index (BMI) and Medicare expenditures. Methods Biennial interview data from the Health and Retirement Survey for a nationally representative sample of older adults enrolled in fee-for...

Recent studies have revealed the polygenic nature of bipolar disorder (BP), and identified common risk variants associated with illness. However, the role of common polygenic risk in multiplex families has not previously been examined. The present study examined 249 European-ancestry families from the NIMH Genetics Initiative sample, comparing subjects with narrowly defined BP (excluding bipola...

PURPOSE Genome-wide association studies have identified common genomic variants associated with increased susceptibility to breast cancer. In the general population, the risk associated with these known variants seems insufficient to inform clinical management. Their contribution to the development of familial breast cancer is less clear. PATIENTS AND METHODS We studied 1,143 women with breas...

Dyslipidemia is an important etiologic factor in the development of cardiovascular disease (CVD), which is a leading cause of death worldwide. As CVD begins in childhood, and as dyslipidemia is an important risk factor for CVD, screening and treatment of dyslipidemia in adolescents and children becomes an important health matter. This review deals with issues related to screening, diagnosis and...