Genetic Insights About Health Risks Limited by Lack of Diversity

For consumers, the idea of getting a genetic test to determine risks for hereditary diseases is becoming an increasingly common proposition, but new research suggests that sometimes the accuracy of those results may depend on what ethnicity you are.

“Historically we've had less African American representation in these studies,” said Arjun Manrai, lead author of the study and research fellow at the Harvard Medical School. “Our paper highlights ethnicity as a key way to get a handle on classification of genetic variants.” Genetic variants are differences in DNA structure that determine human features and are unique to every person.